


Dancing Lessons

by ls269



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22989190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ls269/pseuds/ls269
Summary: My first fanfic for a long time in a fandom I'm fairly new to - please be gentle with me! It's mainly rambling, romance and character stuff at the moment, because these two fascinate me - how their civilian selves are so completely different from their superhero selves, how they balance and complement each other, as creation and destruction should!Disclaimers:I haven't seen season 3.I am way too old to be this in love with a kids show!I am not interested in hearing any comparisons between this and Sympathetic Magic.If you're still on board, hope you enjoy!Lots of love,Lucy.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Comments: 16
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

You can be two different people. Most of us are thousands of different people in the course of our lives, one for each context. There are actors who can change the shape of their face just with their expressions--just with a random bunching and stretching of muscles. So, when you say to me, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t spot her for what she was’, I would invite you to consider Marinette.

Without the mask and the costume, she’s fragile as a china doll--with full cheeks and pink, glossy lips that look as though they’ve been varnished. In the time before, it was tough to see her walking down the street without wincing, because she was so perilously _Marinette_ \--always late for something, always a fraction of a second away from falling over, caring so much and feeling every setback, every snide remark, every thoughtless comment like a hammer blow.

I didn’t know how she survived, but she did. She even excelled at it. She had to wade through the air that other people slid through, but she stood up to bullies, she encouraged her friends, she ran for election as student representative, and did her homework, and made beautiful things just for fun.

But you still knew it hurt her. You could still see her screwing up every fibre of her being in concentration whenever she raised her voice. Beautiful and disastrous. But, of course, I didn’t know that then.

Now pull back from Marinette--maybe you’ve taken your eyes off her for a second, and you look back and she’s not where she was, but you just assume that she’s fallen into a bush or crawled under a park bench in sheer despair--and there is Ladybug.

For anyone who’s ever seen her stride up to the mayor and demand his attention, or stand her ground in front of a nine-foot supervillain made of boulders, or sail through the air on the end of that yo-yo, or come up with a spectacular plan when she appears to be falling to her death from the top of the Eiffel Tower, the sweet, china-cheeked Marinette does not spring to mind.

Ladybug moves like a cross between a detective and a drill-sergeant--like everything is interesting and nobody is watching. Not a trace of clumsiness or self-consciousness. Not much grace either, but you get the feeling she had a look at grace early on and instantly dismissed it for wasting her time.

It’s impossible to describe her--how she teases and poses and strides and struts and tells people what they are going to do in a voice so authoritative that you can see their muscles bending to comply before their brains have a chance to intervene. She is bossy and stubborn and won’t take advice from anyone. She’s a pillar of good sense and moral rectitude. She’s my Ladybug.

Now guess--if you haven’t already--which of these two lovely ladies I fell in love with. I’ll give you a clue: it was not the one who was in love with me.

I’m two people as well, of course, but not in quite the same way. It isn’t a confidence thing. Difficult to see how it could be, because I’ve had people looking at me--staring and sighing and even drooling over me--since I was inappropriately young for the experience.

But I’m happy on the rooftops. I’m happy wearing the mask and having no name and saying nothing of consequence. Most of all, I am happy being with her. The sound of carnage and destruction makes my heart hammer these days, because I know she isn’t far away. I know I’ll have a chance to be quick and survive on my wits and maybe--just maybe--be looked at by her.

Down on the ground, I am… well, nothing. Devastatingly handsome and rich, but trapped and sad and empty and inward-looking. We’ll come back to that. But maybe mine is the more astonishing transformation. To go from pouting, air-headed model-boy to Cat Noir takes some doing, and I’m not sure it’s the magic that’s responsible. Only happiness--sheer, stupid, temporary happiness--can change you that much.

***

There was an after-party on the roof of the TV studio, after we’d helped Nino win the contest. Ladybug didn’t want to stay, but she was besieged as soon as they yelled ‘Cut’, and it’s fun to watch her kindness struggling with her impatience.

“Of course, of course--happy to help--always be here--please get out of my way.”

I was besieged too, but it’s such a step down from the adoring fans that besiege me during the day, I hardly noticed it. I followed her red costume like a beacon through the crowd, saying the odd word to people, but never really lifting my eyes from her. Alya wanted a picture and Nino wanted a hug, and I indulged them both for as long as I could before going after her. I could still feel a tingling in my shoulders, where her hands had rested on them.

She managed to carve a path through the crowd to the railings at the edge of the roof, but she stopped there, as if waiting for me to catch up.

Somebody had slipped a coat over her shoulders, in case she got cold. It’s funny how she inspires these little protective acts, even though she never seems to need anyone or anything. She solemnly made arrangements to return it--because Ladybug--but she didn’t defiantly shrug it off, which meant she was probably as tired as she looked.

I skipped up onto the railing and balanced there, with my stick hoisted casually across my shoulders. I’m never tired, not as Cat Noir.

“Walk you home, milady?”

She leaned against the railing. I could see her shoulders sagging, but she still had the energy to be snarky with me.

“Now why wouldn’t that be a good idea?”

“Walk you _somewhere_?” I offered, unperturbed. “There’s no five-minute warning, no Hawkmoth, no akumatized civilians-”

“Don’t speak too soon,” she said.

I shrugged. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to go again.”

She gave me one of her sweet, unwilling smiles. I really love those--not just a treat but a triumph. I make her happy, I think--although I’ve never worked out whether she considers that to be a good thing.

“You obviously can’t walk me home,” she said. “But we can walk.”

I blinked. I hadn’t been expecting her to acquiesce so soon. But I recovered magnificently, as I always do. I gave her a bow and offered my hand, but she was off already, slinging that yo-yo and scything through the air after it, flipping and tumbling at the crest of every swing, as if it was a matter of supreme indifference whether the line held or whether she smacked into the sidewalk down below. I followed as best I could, trying not to smile too much.

We stopped somewhere near the Champs Elysees. She sat down on the slates and leaned against a chimney stack, half-closing her eyes. I flipped over the chimney and landed, propped up on my elbows, at her feet. I had no idea what to do, but was too happy to care.

Everything was a game anyway, with us. There was not much chance of anything real happening, and sometimes I almost didn’t want it to. I just wanted her to be her and me to be me and nothing to ever change between us, ever.

But at the same time, I really wanted her eyes to close all the way. I really wanted to ease that coat off her shoulders, and trail my lips along her neck, and hear her sigh. Just the thought of it made something tighten painfully inside me. I almost stopped smiling.

She tilted her head and rubbed her neck, as if she’d felt my imaginary kisses.

“I was really hoping for a quiet night in tonight.”

“You mean to tell me you don’t spend your evenings soaring over the city looking for evil-doers?” I said. “I’m disappointed.”

I was delighted. The thought of Ladybug having a quiet night in--curled up in front of the TV in her mask and costume, maybe with a cat purring on her lap--was incredibly funny to me, and I couldn’t help saying so. She narrowed her eyes irritably and said, “With loved ones.”

That wiped the smile off my face--both because _I_ don’t have any, and because it was torture to imagine _her_ with some. I hadn’t even been happy about the cat on her lap.

But I was here, and the night was too beautiful for jealousy. Down below, I could see the lights of the passing traffic, like a jewelled necklace sliding along the road.

She suddenly looked at me and said, “This wasn’t your idea, was it? For Nino to choose us as the celebrities he had to make dance for him?”

“I might have suggested it.”

She closed her eyes, too tired now for snarkiness. “Kitty,” she said, in a soft, despairing voice. “Why did it have to be _dancing_? Why couldn’t it have been like…yo-yo skills or judo demonstrations or--or talks about crime prevention?”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. She was too cute. She had the Ladybug portion of the world all mapped out, but anything outside of super-heroism was terrifying. There be dragons.

“Well, in the first round it was sufficient to just nod your head to the beat,” I pointed out, “but I thought you’d probably be too kind to risk it.”

She let out a long, slow breath that ruffled her fringe. “Damnit, I didn’t even think of that!”

“Can’t think of everything, milady.”

She treated this remark with the contempt she felt it deserved. She was always trying to think of everything, all the time. Suddenly I could understand her exhaustion. I just couldn’t share it.

I had every moment of that dance stored up in my memory--every self-conscious twirl, every time she cocked her head or rolled her eyes at me. The feel of her hands on my back. It was all there, teeming behind my eyeballs and making me grin uncontrollably.

“You didn’t have to turn up,” I said reasonably.

“Yes I did! He was so nice. _You_ didn’t have to turn up,” she added. “I know _you’re_ not swayed by considerations of decency.” 

I spread my hands in a gesture of smug innocence. “I couldn’t let my adoring public down.”

“You really love being Cat Noir, don’t you?”

“Who wouldn’t?” I said, with the straightest face I could manage. “Why? Don’t you like being Ladybug?”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and gave a squirming shrug. “I don’t know. I like helping people. I know I’d be miserable if I couldn’t do it. It’s just…don’t you feel like you’re always having to bail out on your real life? I have a job and family and friends and--” she waved a hand vaguely--“studies.”

“I know you’re a high-school student, Ladybug. You don’t have to be cagey about that.”

“Well, anyway,” she said, frowning in disapproval. She didn’t like that I knew so much, and I didn’t like that I knew so little. “I’m always late for something, or in trouble with someone, or letting somebody down, and I can’t even tell them _why_ \--”

“You’re lucky,” I said, unable to stop myself. “No-one cares about _me_ enough to notice that I’m gone.”

She looked at me, startled, probably half-suspecting it was a joke. “Cat Noir…”

I panicked. This was not a road I wanted to go down, especially not with her. I winched my smile back in place and said, “Bugaboo, you’re trying to do too much. You need to simplify. Concentrate on the things that are most important to you.”

“They’re _all_ most important to me.”

“OK, concentrate on the ones that make you happiest.”

“They _all_ make me happiest!”

I squinted at her. “You don’t look very happy at the moment.”

She tightened her lips, but didn’t snap at me. I realized I was vaguely disappointed.

“OK, Little Miss Everything,” I said, cupping my chin in my hands. “You keep on keeping on. We’ll see how long it takes before you collapse.”

I think she was reassured by my rudeness--either that or she’d just stopped listening to me--because she bit her lip and muttered, “Kitty… about what you said before. Is it true? Are you lonely?”

I straightened up. “Lonely? Are you kidding me? I have to fight my admirers off with a stick! Really, if you knew--”

She clenched her jaw. “Cat Noir, can you be real with me for five freaking seconds? We’re friends, aren’t we? Do you want to hang out more?”

I hesitated, surprise taking the place of panic. “Do you have _time_ to hang out more?”

Again, she half-closed her eyes. I could almost see the weariness hanging above her, like an axe ready to fall. I had a wild, stupid urge to tackle her to the slates, just to knock her out of the way. But it didn’t fall. She was fighting it, the way she fights everything--by thinking.

A smile struggled up to the surface of her face, and it stayed there. “You’re my partner,” she said, shrugging. “I’ll always have time for you.”

The smile was infectious, even though I felt frustrated, annoyed and tender all at once. I didn’t want her to pity me. Although I really did. I sighed and said, “Ladybug, _this_ is why you are always so miserable. And so perfect.”

“Think about it, OK? I can manage an hour a week.”

I blinked stupidly. “And this would be… _what_ would this be?”

“Hanging out. Superhero talk. Absolutely no kissy faces.”

“I will think about it,” I said, because it was all I could say. I had a horrible nightmare-image of throwing myself to the slates at her feet and saying, ‘Oh my god, thank you! I’m so alone!’

Instead, I said, “Ladybug, I wish I could get to know you on the ground.”

“You’d be disappointed. I’m a lot less sure of myself down there.”

***

We had a lot to talk about, Plagg and I, when we got back to my room and transformed. I flung myself down on the bed, surrounded by the consoles and pool-tables and widescreen TVs that usually put me in mind of ancient, brooding monoliths when I come to bed at night. But tonight, they were all friends--they were all beautiful.

“Best night ever,” I said, in a breathless, grinning rush. “She-danced-with-me-I-made-her-laugh-she-touched-my-arm-she-smells-like-strawberries!”

“Why?” said Plagg, stalking across the bed, too angry to even ask for cheese. “Why didn’t you say we’d hang out with her? This could have been our chance to get to know her--find out who she really is!”

Plagg loves her too. He’s in my skin when she touches me, and you can’t get in the middle of a reaction like that without feeling something.

I sat up, the smile fading. I wanted to dwell on her strawberry-scented hair, and this was an unwelcome distraction.

“Plagg, I’m not going to be another one of the obligations that are driving her crazy. I’m not going to be another favour she can’t say no to. I’m going to figure out a way to spend time with her _and_ give something back.”

“What are you talking about?” said Plagg. “People don’t ask for something back when they’re spending time with their friends!”

“Until I know she’s not just offering it out of kindness, I’m not going to _take_ her time. But I’ll think of something, Plagg. What _else_ have I got to think about?”

***

“I’ve got it,” I said, the next time we were alone together. I don’t count the bad guys, or the reporters, or the civilians who’ve been zapped and turned into grotesque minions of the akuma-victim. Usually, there are so many crashes and screams, so many missiles whizzing through the air, that it provides the perfect cover for a private conversation. And today, at least, we weren’t at ground level. We were in a rooftop garden on top of the Japanese Consulate--with a koi pond, and blossom trees, and pits of gravel teased into loops and lines and swirls. It would have been beautifully tranquil if it hadn’t been for the Switcher. 

That’s what he calls himself. He can substitute things for other things in a hurry. It’s very disorientating. He touches your arm and you’re suddenly standing on the other side of the street, and some terrified traffic-cop is under his hands where _you_ should be.

At that moment, he was using his power to throw handfuls of gravel that turned in mid-air into road signs, bikes, scooters and parked cars. Some of them were occupied, and needed catching before they fell fifty feet onto the Rue Petrarque down below us.

He was a street magician before he was akumatized--dressed in a cloak and top hat, with eerily-spotless white gloves. But magicians don’t like it when their tricks are revealed, and this one was willing to embrace real, dark magic to keep the sleight-of-hand stuff private.

I say ‘willing’--I really don’t know willing they are when Hawkmoth akumatizes them. I’ve seen one or two of them try to fight it, but they never get very far. This one, though, was not a great guy to begin with. There was not much better nature to appeal to.

“What?” said Ladybug, flinging herself backwards to avoid the Switcher’s hands. He needs to touch you with those gloves in order to switch you, so he was coming at us with arms outstretched, like a mummy in an old horror movie.

“Dancing lessons,” I said, as if that explained everything. 

“What are you talking about?” she snapped, but half-way through, her voice got distant, because his hand had clamped down on her arm and zapped her into the air. A seagull was suddenly screeching and beating its wings in the space where she had been a second before.

She plummeted, but I saw her yo-yo catch on the edge of the rooftop, and she hauled herself up after it.

“That’s what we can do in our evenings,” I said, edging back from the Switcher’s white-gloved hands. “I’m incredibly good, and you could use some practice.”

“You said I was fine,” she said, momentarily distracted. I jerked her back and the Switcher’s hand scythed past, a millimetre away from her cheek.

She kicked him in the stomach, annoyed with herself, and bowled her yo-yo around his hands as he doubled up, binding his wrists together.

She climbed onto his shoulders to pin him down, but he was already bucking and struggling underneath her. He threw her backwards as he stood up, but I used my stick to knock his feet out from under him, and she pulled at his bound hands, reeling him in like a fish.

“How do we get the gloves off him if we can’t touch them?” she hissed, out of the corner of her mouth.

She didn’t really need an answer. She was already squinting round, assessing our surroundings, wearing the determined pout she always gets on her face when she’s thinking. She would use her lucky charm soon, and I’d only have five minutes to reason with her before she skipped away.

Here’s another thing she does--and it’s slightly the Ladybug magic, and slightly the inimitable genius of the girl under the mask. She builds things with the world around her--with the debris of a fight, with railings and shop-awnings and sculptures, with bad guys and pigeons and innocent bystanders. She sees the trajectory they’re going to take and knows just how to pull them together for her advantage. She assembles the moment like a jigsaw puzzle, and when you see the final picture, it’s so awesome that it strikes you dumb. You can’t help but love her.

What does she do with that fertile imagination when she’s Marinette? She imagines all the hideous ways in which things could go wrong. She imagines how people are going to look at her and judge her. But she brings the same kind of magic to bear on that. Because she imagines it, because she pulls it all together in her head, it happens. She doesn’t want it to, but her restless mind won’t stop building.

Anyway, I didn’t know that then. And I’d better not go too far down that road. When I talk about Marinette’s despair, we’re getting perilously close to The End, and I only want to talk about that once.

“The best part is,” I continued, as she reeled the Switcher in, “nobody in your real life would be suspicious, because you really _would_ be learning dancing. You could show them.”

“Kitty, I don’t think this is really the best time.”

“And there’ll be a dance,” I continued, as if I hadn’t heard her. “There’s always a dance, whatever school you go to. Some end-of-term thing where you have to dress up and take a partner. I could coach you for it.”

The Switcher was panicking now, flailing around, knocking over potted ferns and turning them into cats.

“I wasn’t going to go,” she said sniffily. “I’m too busy. And there’s nobody I want to go with who’s going to ask me.”

“Who do you want to go with who _isn’t_ going to ask you?” I demanded. But I shut my eyes and tried to be calm. She was a pretty girl with a beating heart and there was bound to be somebody she liked. I had always known that.

Trying to ignore the sour taste in my mouth, I said, “Well, maybe if he saw how good at dancing you were, he _would_ ask you.”

She looked up at me, and then down at the Switcher, who gave her a look of silent rage but also--almost imperceptibly--shrugged.

That was the last straw for Ladybug. She’s touchy enough about _me_ getting involved in her private life. When the supervillains do it, something tends to snap.

She yanked the Switcher off his feet with the yo-yo string, pinned his wrists under her boot, and then cried out, “Lucky charm!”

The magic did its thing, and into her hands dropped a red-and-black spotted lighter--the kind you don’t see so much anymore, since vaping came to town.

She looked at me again--tentatively this time, as if asking permission. I shrugged. It would be pretty cruel, but it would definitely get his gloves off. And any burns would disappear once she’d captured the akuma and brought everything back to normal. But this wasn’t the first time I’d suspected that the nature of the lucky charm worked in accordance with her mood.

Still, I can’t judge. There’s nothing cute and cuddly about the Cataclysm.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” she said, as if she was trying to convince herself.

“I know you’re not.”

But we shouldn’t have taken our eyes off him. The Switcher had managed to squirm round under her boots and get his palms flat on the rooftop. He glared into the distance, where the sun was twinkling through the girders of the Eiffel Tower. And then we were there—or rather, it was here, rising out of the Rue Petrarque, and our peaceful little rooftop garden was over there, looking diminutive in the middle of the Champ de Mars.

We staggered, trying to find a footing between the rivets and girders that stretched up in an endless metal cage above us.

I don’t know why people always try to kill us with the Eiffel Tower. I guess it is pretty eye-catching. But if you’d seen Ladybug zipping between its levels like a spider, weaving webs and nets and traps with the string of that yo-yo, you’d think twice before using it against her. It’s her element.

“OK,” she said, trying to steady herself and shout above the howling wind. We were a lot higher up than we had been in the rooftop garden. “OK. So he’s got to be touching one object and _looking_ at the other. Then he can switch them.”

She didn’t need to say anything else. I’ve been listening to her plans for so long that I can fill in the details in my head. I saluted and pushed off with my stick, working my way up and over the girder where the Switcher stood. Then I dropped down on his shoulders and rammed his hat down over his eyes.

He lurched backwards and we fell, flailing, but the yo-yo caught his wrist and he dangled by it, one glove completely exposed, his hat still covering his eyes. I was hanging by his legs but I climbed up carefully, reaching for his other arm and pulling it wide so that he couldn’t touch anything.

“Any time you’re ready, milady,” I said, through gritted teeth.

She was whistling as she came over the girder towards us--actually whistling, as if she had all the time in the world. She knelt down and touched the lighter to the hand he was dangling by.

“I’ve always wanted to learn how to dance,” she murmured, as she struggled to get the fire to catch. I imagined his gloves were pretty damp by now. “I’ll take the lessons, but not the coaching. I’m not going to take romantic advice from you.”

“Not going to offer it,” I said, climbing onto the girder and pulling the Switcher after me. The sour taste was still in my mouth.

She somersaulted over us, torching the Switcher’s other glove on her way past. He was already crying out, but not really in pain—more in irritation. It sounded like Hawkmoth’s voice to me, not that I’ve heard him use it often. A hiss of frustration, too harsh for words. The knowledge that he’d lost again and was no closer to—well, whatever it is he wants our miraculouses for. And every defeat makes him that little bit more desperate.

The Switcher was pawing at his hands, trying to strip the gloves off without touching the flames. But he didn’t even have to. The fabric was breaking up, singeing away as we watched, and the akuma slipped out as it crumbled, rising from the ashes like a very suspect phoenix.

His skin was pretty much unscathed where the gloves had been, and I wondered if they had been miraculous Ladybug flames--tight and controlled and judicious, just like she was. As streamlined as a scalpel.

After she had captured the akuma, after the miraculous red rush—the thing that always looks like a storm of flower petals—had whipped round us, ruffling our hair, restoring everything to its proper place, after we had bumped fists and said ‘Pound it’, we were back in the rooftop garden, with an ordinary street magician looking sad and disoriented at our feet.

“Week-nights,” I said, before she could even lower her fist. “Eight o’clock. I’ll find a place.”

It was worth it just to see the look of panic on her face.

“What? I said I could manage an hour a week! Thursday nights or nothing.”

I regarded her critically, like a proper dancing-master, as if I was sizing her up and finding everything wanting. It made her giggle and glare at the same time.

“Tuesdays _and_ Thursdays,” I said. “It’s going to take lots of work, Cinderella, if you want to go to that ball.”

She sighed. “You’ll get sick of me and my two left feet.”

“Two evenings a week with _me_ as your teacher?” I said, leaning casually on my stick. “You won’t have two left feet for very long.”

***

Things don’t seem as real when I’m Adrien—even though they are crushingly, tediously real when I can bring myself to feel them. But mostly, I don’t care as much. It starts with the deadening voice of Nathalie as she comes in with a clipboard at seven to go through my schedule. Then I have breakfast alone at one end of a big conference table. Then I get on with the business of being quietly fabulous. I’m very confident, but you learn to suppress a lot of thoughts and questions when you’re the centre of adoring attention all the time. You have to know how to shut your brain down when you have hordes of screaming fans hanging off your coat, weeping and protesting that they’ll die if you don’t go out with them.

I _would_ have gone out with them, in the pre-Ladybug days. I would have done anything to get out of the house and stop thinking about my mother’s disappearance. But unfortunately, none of those things were an option.

Anyway, I go through the motions. I blink serenely at the teachers. I have been instructed in the art of keeping my face expressionless to avoid wrinkles. You have to try pretty hard—or get pretty lucky—to startle a reaction out of me.

Marinette’s good at that. The clumsy chaos she brings with her, the disastrous way she phrases things--they shock me out of my stupor. She’s got a special way of saying my name. It starts out strong, and then kind of trails off, as if she’s had the breath knocked out of her. If I had to write it down, it would look like: ‘A-drien.’

Anyway, she said it in chemistry class the next day, when Chloe, Sabrina and I were leaning over a bunsen burner, trying to get sulphuric acid to bubble.

I looked up at her and she froze, as if she’d forgotten what it was she had been about to say. I saw her open and close her hands, aimlessly, and then whisper, “Could I borrow that-?”

She was looking at the beaker, but she seemed to have forgotten the word for it. I started to say, “The bea-?” but Chloe cut me off.

“No, don’t help her, Adrien, I want to see if she can get this.” She fixed Marinette with a look of wide-eyed innocence and said, “You can do it, Marinette. I believe in you. He’s even given you the first syllable. The bea-bea-?”

I grabbed the beaker and pressed it hurriedly into Marinette’s hands. “Take it, Marinette. No problem,” I added, to spare her the necessity of having to think up a ‘thank you’.

I watched her fleeting, grateful, pink-cheeked smile, watched her take the beaker back to her work-station with laboured steps, as if she was having to concentrate very hard on not falling over. I heard Chloe’s grating laugh and Sabrina’s titter. And I realized I was completely, one hundred per cent conscious. The way Marinette must be all the time.

There I was--slap bang in the middle of my life, without a single wall in place. I could have thought anything, picked up on anything. I didn’t pick up on Marinette, though. I don’t know if it’s coming through, but I am still--even after all these years--fucking annoyed about that.

I shuddered at Chloe’s cruelty, but that was the only epiphany I was going to get. And by the time I got to fencing class, the fog of apathy had closed over my head again. If I had any shreds of sensitivity left, I just used them to think about Ladybug.

“What if we really _are_ teaching her just so she can go to her school-dance with some jerk?” said Plagg, when I opened my locker at the end of practise. He sleeps in there, curled up around a wedge of camembert, when I’m fencing, but he must have been lying awake worrying today, because he started up with his cynical questions before the other students had even left the locker-room.

“What if we are?” I said, watching the last stragglers heading through the door for lunch. “You said you wanted to spend more time with her.”

“But isn’t there a better way than this?”

I spread my hands. I was feeling touchy and excitable, as if somebody had just set fire to _my_ gloves.

“I don’t have anything else, Plagg. I don’t have anything else to give her.”

That’s the strange, sad paradox of being Adrien Agreste. I have everything and nothing. I have money, but I don’t get to decide how I spend it, I have adoring fans, but I don’t get to exchange more than a few words with them before I’m whisked off in a car by my gorilla-shaped bodyguard, I have a handsome face that hides who I really am, even from myself, I have a brain so atrophied and underused that I never figured out Marinette had a crush on me when she trailed off in the middle of her sentences. And I have the big, aching hole left by my mother’s disappearance, that sucks in every smile or laugh or interesting observation. Until I put the mask on. Until I’m Cat Noir and I’m up on those rooftops, when everything is leaps and quips and somersaults. But Cat Noir is giving her everything he’s got already and, to be honest, it doesn’t seem to please.

“Besides,” I said, “we’ve got months until the end of term. Time enough to make her forget about the jerk--if there _is_ a jerk.”

“There is always a jerk,” said Plagg gloomily.

***

I found the perfect rooftop--another TV studio, long-since disused, screened from the ground on all sides by aerials and satellite dishes. It wasn’t as pretty as the garden of tranquillity, but it was private. Plus, I thought tranquillity would probably not survive long periods of contact with Ladybug.

She turned up only twenty minutes late, not wearing a coat. She had been too polite to tell that guy at the after-party, but we don’t get cold in our costumes. It’s something to do with the magic tingling in our skin.

Besides, it didn’t rain. With Cat-Noir-esque optimism, I decided to interpret this as a lucky sign.

Despite what I’d said to Plagg, I didn’t have a plan. I’d given up trying to figure out who she was, and I didn’t know how you’d go about trapping a woman into falling in love with you. It didn’t seem right, when I thought of it like that.

I guess my plan was to just drink her in until she was wrenched away. No, that was Plagg talking. Cat Noir always believed that something would turn up. And, because he believed it, it always did.

We started with the waltz. I played the music on my phone, pointed out the rhythm threading its way through the melody, and told her she had to follow where I led. She hated it.

“Bugaboo, you’re thinking too much,” I said, the seventh or eighth time she stumbled over my toes. “When you’re dancing, you only need to be aware of two things: the rhythm and your partner.”

“Can’t I lead?” she protested. “It’s not natural for me to just--”

“ _No_ ,” I said patiently, trying to pretend I wasn’t finding her hilarious. “This is a good lesson for you, Ladybug. You don’t get to be in control all the time--in life _or_ in dancing. You don’t need to know where we’re going. You just need to trust.”

I hesitated, wondering if I dared to push the point further. But there was nothing I _wouldn’t_ dare, up here.

“Let’s try this,” I said. “Shut your eyes.”

“What? We’re on top of a roof!”

“You trust me, don’t you?”

She gave me a sullen frown. “I’m not saying I don’t. It’s just, like, four times in the last month, you’ve been zapped by the akuma victim and tried to kill me.”

“On at least three of those occasions, I was trying to stop the akuma victim from zapping _you_ ,” I said, twirling her around, not even bothering to hide my smile anymore. She moved stiffly, grudgingly, but she followed my lead. “And I’m taking your first answer.”

I waltzed her round the rooftop one more time, watching her stumble jerkily through the steps, more or less in time with the rhythm. She kept looking at her feet.

“Stop thinking,” I said. And then again, after a few more reels, “ _Stop thinking_.”

“I’m not!” she protested.

“Ladybug, I can tell when you’re thinking. You get that determined pout. It’s very adorable, but it’s not helping here. Shut your eyes.”

She gave me another glare, and then lowered her eyelids.

“Right,” I said, feeling excited and bereft at the same time, now she was no longer looking at me. “Let me take you through a scenario-- _one_ , two, three--don’t lose the rhythm. You are up on the rooftops, listening to the sound of carnage down below. You look down, and there’s the akuma victim--a big gorilla, say. He’s picking up parked cars and hurling them at passers-by. You see a woman with a buggy under the shadow of a huge limousine that’s hurtling through the air towards her. You get ready to leap--but wait, Cat Noir’s already caught it.”

I twirled her around again, watching the furrows on her eyelids. They were gradually smoothing out as she relaxed.

“You swing down on the end of your yo-yo, while the gorilla beats its chest. He’s scooped up an old lady and is squeezing her in his fist. You don’t have much time, you have to get her out--but no, Cat Noir’s already saved her.”

Ladybug gave a spluttering giggle, but didn’t open her eyes.

“Now the gorilla has pushed over some traffic lights, and a kindergarten teacher in a fluffy pink cardigan is about to get pinned underneath them. No big deal, Cat Noir’s pushed her out of the way.” I whirled her round again, changing direction, trying to make my story fit in with the rhythm. “You have to find the akuma--Cat Noir’s got it. You think you need your lucky charm--nope, Cat Noir’s already got a plan.”

She was laughing hard now. Her hand had tightened around mine. It was suddenly very difficult to concentrate on my story and my steps.

“Surely you at least need to use your yo-yo to capture the akuma as it flies away? No, Cat Noir’s done it for you. Everything is taken care of, my Ladybug. The only thing left for you to do is fly.”

And, for a moment, she _did_ fly. She was the Ladybug of the rooftops, eyes closed and smiling, letting herself fall joyously at the crest of every swing. It was amazing. She trusted me with every step--she took the directions I gave her and embellished them with grace, as if we were just one creature. No, better than one creature--two creatures who understood and complemented each other.

I don’t know how long it lasted for. I know I was out of breath by the time the music stopped, but that doesn’t mean anything. She was breath-taking.

The sudden silence broke the spell. She stumbled to a halt and opened her eyes, the colour high in her cheeks, the aftermath of all that exhilaration shining in her face. She took hold of my hands and squeezed them.

“I did it--I did it! Kitty, did you see?”

I couldn’t talk, but she didn’t seem to need a response. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, inordinately pleased with herself.

When I had recovered enough to be Cat Noir again, I said:

“Exhausting _and_ amazing. The way everything is with you.”

She ignored this. “Now, whenever I need to not think, I’ll just picture Cat Noir saving everyone from a big gorilla, and I’ll be laughing too hard to be self-conscious.”

“Not sure what’s so funny about it,” I muttered. “But I can’t argue with the results.”


	2. The Worst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I'm continuing this fanfic in a pretty meandering fashion, because I love the characters so much (and because I need to think about something other than terrifying current events!)   
> This is kind of an examination of Plagg and Adrien's relationship (I love Plagg and think sometimes that I might actually be him!)

It couldn’t always be like that, of course. Being an over-thinker must be a lot like being an alcoholic. Every day is a new fight.

I kept her at the waltz for the next couple of weeks, much to her annoyance.

“Kitty, I know these steps so well that I’m literally falling asleep,” she grumbled, as we twirled sedately around our sheltered rooftop.

“There’s a saying in dance, Ladybug,” I told her. “‘Don’t practise until you can get it right. Practise until you _can’t get it wrong_.’”

She groaned. “Talk to me, then. Keep me from falling asleep. What’s your Kwami’s name?”

“Plagg,” I said. “Yours?”

“Tikki.” I could see the enthusiasm kindling in her cheeks--her eyes widening and softening as if she’d just seen an adorable kitten. “She’s amazing. She’s the only one I can talk to about everything--you know, superhero life _and_ civilian life. She always understands, and she’s always positive, and she always sets me straight whenever I’m going wrong.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I had never heard her gushing about someone so unreservedly.

“What’s Plagg like?” she said, her voice still honeyed with enthusiasm.

“He likes camembert,” I said.

“No, not what _does_ he like--what _is_ he like?”

I shrugged. “That’s the full extent of his personality. He likes camembert.”

This got a smile out of her, so I elaborated. “The ripest, stinkiest kind of camembert. Which I have to carry around with me all day long to revive him after a transformation. Which means I have to go everywhere smelling of camembert.”

“Well, I _like_ the smell of camembert,” she insisted.

“Yet another reason why we were made for each other, milady.”

She gave me a dubious smile. “It’s the first I’ve seen.”

I think Master Fu put a lot of thought into it when he chose Plagg to be my Kwami. Though it wasn’t necessarily a kind thought.

He once told me that when he first saw Marinette--when she saved his life on that crossing--she said she was no stranger to disaster. That must have rung alarm-bells in the head of someone who was measuring her up to be Cat Noir. Or maybe he always intended her for Ladybug. Maybe the woman is always creation and the man is always destruction. That would certainly fit. And she does look good in the costume--not that she isn’t also gorgeous as Lady Noir.

Anyway, I think when he saw me, he must have thought I was all sunshine, buttercups and rainbows. Maybe he’d seen one of my ad campaigns. So he paired me up with Plagg, because Plagg needs a constant source of positivity to temper his destructive nature.

It works, most of the time. I think the best of people, he thinks the worst, and together we end up getting somewhere near the truth. If either of us were more interested in what was going on around us, we could be detectives. A good cop and a bad cop. We’d stop being Cat Noir and just be Noir. We _were_ like that once, after The End. But that’s another story. For the purposes of this story, all you need to know is that our relationship works well, but it comes at the price of constant exasperation on both sides.

I’ll give you a case in point. It’s been preying on my mind recently.

We had a couple more weeks of dancing lessons, we saved the world in some pretty spectacular ways, and then Heroes’ Day happened.

I suppose I was grinning a lot in the car on my way from Marinette’s picnic to the charity dinner--maybe I was even staring into space in a happy, concussed kind of way--because Plagg crawled out of my pocket and nudged me with his nose.

“So… are we going to talk about it?”

I blinked. “What?” I saw him bury his face in his hands, and added, “You mean the fact that Marinette kissed me? What is there to talk about?”

“I don’t know,” he said tentatively. “Anything coming into your head?”

I sighed. “Plagg, she’s a very dear friend--she’s an angel--but she’s not my Ladybug.”

“ _Someone_ is.”

“What?”

He nodded at the rain-lashed windows, which gave a half-melted look to the city outside.

“Someone in Paris right now _is_ your Ladybug,” he said patiently. “And by ignoring every woman you feel drawn to, you’re reducing your chances of finding her.”

I rested my chin in my upturned palm. “So you want me to ask out every girl in Paris?”

“Well, you’re a handsome teen model. You’ve got a better chance than most.”

“Plagg!” I whispered, shocked. “That’s reprehensible.”

“That’s a big word,” he replied, still staring out of the window. Sometimes I really can’t place him. I can’t decide whether he’s a whiny, joyful child or an evil genius. I guess maybe the personification of destruction would be a bit of both.

“Where do you think she is now?” he said. “Out in the rain without an umbrella? Do you think she lives in a mansion, or a one-bedroom apartment? Do you think she has a family? Do you think people are kind to her?”

“Stop it,” I said--as loud as I dared, with my bodyguard sitting up front, drumming his fingers on the steering-wheel. We were sitting in traffic on the Champs Elysees, and there was only the damp squeak of the windscreen-wipers to drown out my voice. “If I start worrying about things like that, I’ll never stop. Whatever her situation is, no-one is better equipped to deal with it. She’s _Ladybug_.”

Plagg fell silent. I started to wish I had brought more cheese to distract him with.

“I’ve given up trying to figure out who she is, Plagg,” I said, in a softer voice. “But I see her and help her almost every day, and one day, maybe, if I’m really patient and really lucky, she’ll feel the same way about me as I do about her.”

Plagg half-closed his eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was scowling or pondering.

“As plans go…” he muttered.

“What?”

“Well, it’s admirable in its directness--you’re _always_ admirable in your directness. It’s just not the smartest plan I’ve ever heard.”

I narrowed my eyes, and said coolly, “Well, you’re the one who knows who she is. You could just _tell_ me.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Because you promised her kwami?”

Plagg curled up sulkily on the seat beside me. “It’s not just that. You know what I’ve come to realize--no, that’s not right--you know what’s been gradually beaten into my head over thousands of years of being the spirit of destruction? Creation and destruction have to stay balanced. Like opposite ends of a scale. That means never coming together.”

“Oh come on,” I said, because I hadn’t liked the sound of ‘never coming together’. “We’re people, not abstract principles!”

“It’s worse at the start,” he went on, ignoring me. “The tipping-point--where you each start to figure out who the other is, and how you feel about them. That’s when bad things happen.” He waved his tail once or twice, in a fitful, unsettled kind of way. “The problem is, I’m too involved now. I don’t want you to succeed as Cat Noir and Ladybug--I want you to succeed as Adrien and--”

He broke off and glanced up at me.

“Wow,” I said. I couldn’t quite keep the longing out of my voice. “You even know her _name_.”

He put his chin back down on his paws. “So what? I wish I didn’t. Can’t do either of us any good.”

“Has it ever happened before? That Cat Noir and Ladybug fell in love?”

“It happens pretty regularly,” said Plagg, with a hint of bitterness. “They start to care about each other more than they care about the mission, and then it’s ‘Bye-bye, Plagg’, ‘Bye-bye, Tikki.’”

“We’d never do that,” I said.

“Oh yeah? What would you do if you had to choose between Ladybug’s life and Hawkmoth’s defeat?”

My smile didn’t falter for a second. “I’d choose Ladybug’s life, and then we’d come back and defeat him later.”

“All right. What would you do if you had to choose between her life and surrendering your Miraculous?”

“Ladybug would never let that happen.”

Plagg rolled his eyes. I shouldn’t have been able to tell that he was rolling his eyes, because his head was still leaning gloomily on his paws, but I could read him pretty well by now. Especially his exasperation. “You’re the worst,” he muttered.

He says this whenever he thinks I’m being naïve or out of touch--whenever, as he puts it, ‘you’re being impossibly nice and making everyone else feel like a jerk for having normal feelings’.

He said it when Chloe’s mother was praising Marinette to the skies, offering to take her to New York and make her a world-famous designer, and I turned happily to Chloe and said, “Isn’t this great for Marinette?” He said it when I refused to celebrate Chloe’s imminent departure with the rest of the school, and made Marinette feel like a monster for experiencing a pang of happiness that her childhood persecutor would finally be leaving her alone.

I see his point now, but back then--all those times, including this one--I put it down to the fact that he was feeling cranky because we’d run out of cheese.

“What happened before?” I said. “All the other times that Cat Noir and Ladybug fell in love? Did the world end?”

“From _my_ perspective,” he said, his voice muffled because he refused to look up at me.

I nudged him with the tip of my finger. “I’ll never give you up. You found me at the loneliest time of my life and got me out in the fresh air, socializing.”

I don’t have the disposition for moping, but it was important, the moment Plagg found me. Everything started to happen after that. I met Ladybug, I got to go to school, I got close to Nino and Alya and Marinette. I don’t think I would have done any of it without Plagg’s rebellious spirit. He was like a breath of fresh air--which is pretty ironic, given the odour of stale camembert he normally radiates.

Plagg chuckled darkly. “Socializing? With super-villains and akuma-victims and--”

“And her,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. We were nearing our destination now. Soon someone would open the car-door for me, hold an umbrella over my head, tell me how honoured they were by my visit. There would be flash-bulbs and canapes and speeches. Maybe my father would do some kind of remote broadcast from his office, praising the charity and the wonderful work it was doing with--what was it? War veterans? Political prisoners? I had literally no idea. I just knew that I would spend the whole evening fantasizing about some kind of emergency that would make it necessary to transform into Cat Noir again. And if I had something to look forward to--some kind of hint, some kind of hope, something more than the strangely persistent tingle of Marinette’s kiss on my cheek--I wouldn’t be swallowed up by it all.

“You could tell me who she is,” I said, talking fast now, as the car pulled up. “The world wouldn’t end. Just give me a hint.”

Plagg looked up at me with one of his sunny, ingratiating smiles. “You stopped asking _her_ because you love her. And I _know_ you love me…”

I leaned my head against the window-pane. I could feel all that apathy teeming on the other side of the glass, as persistent as the paparazzi, waiting to swallow me up. Marinette’s kiss was evaporating. The last proper emotion I felt before the car door was wrenched open was exasperation.

“You’re the worst,” I said. 


	3. The Reset Button

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another new chapter, written as an attempt to cheer me up in quarantine! The start of all that 'The End' stuff that I've been hinting about. Hope you enjoy, and stay safe!

Here is why you shouldn’t get upset by all the love triangles and unrequited longings--at least, on _my_ account. I live here. This is where my soul is. In a leap or a lunge or a split-second decision--in the way my breath catches in my throat when I can see a plan emerging from nothing--in the way we anticipate each other, fit into each other, build solutions at high speed.

Honestly, I can start out touchy and sulky and nursing a handful of grudges, but after five minutes on the rooftops, living off my wits, I’m Cat Noir again. The sunshine child. My sense of optimism re-inflates and I’m unsinkable.

This is what keeps our impossible situation going--the fragile equilibrium of loving each other and not _knowing_ that we love each other. I confess my feelings, and she rejects me, and I get upset and try to give up on her, and then I spend five minutes fighting by her side and realize that I can’t give up any more than I can stop confessing my feelings. And then it starts all over again. I have a reset button, as Cat Noir, that always allows me to bounce back.

I think a similar cycle was happening on her side--similar but opposite. She couldn’t _start_ confessing her feelings. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if she’d told me--told Adrien, that is. Would an outright confession have made it through my determined ignorance? Or would I have found elaborate ways to misunderstand her? Would I have rejected her in such a kind, encouraging way that it wouldn’t have solved anything for either of us?

That’s why I honestly think we like the irresolution, the suspense. She tried to keep me at arms’ length as much as I did her. For a long time, she wanted to idealize me, not to know me. That’s why she loved Adrien and not Cat Noir. And I--as you are shortly to discover--wanted to love a fearless badass who I never had to worry about. You have no idea how badly _that_ backfired on me.

So if it seems like we’re in pain--and I get it, we are--just remember that we live in the balance. We’re not just pining fourteen-year-olds, any more than we’re just superheroes. We’re creation and destruction in balance. If one of us shifts our position, shuffles up too close to the other, it’s all over. The whole edifice of civilization comes crumbling down. Ever seen five thousand denizens of Paris ranged along the Pont Neuf, ready to throw themselves into the Seine? You’re about to, if you keep reading.

***

It comes back to me at least twice a week, the nightmare I walked through in the centre of Paris. The End. I’ve been happy since then--almost every moment that I’m _not_ thinking about The End--but it never leaves me. It’s like a nasty scar. I’ll never forget the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of all the air being squeezed out of my lungs. The pressure of sorrow behind my eyeballs.

It wasn’t a conventional but a personal nightmare. That was the worst thing about it, the idea that it had been tailored just for me--by accident, to begin with, but as soon as Hawkmoth caught on, he played up to it. He saw the bits that hurt me, and expanded on them. She did too, in the end.

That’s why I’m concentrating on all this dancing--on all the happy times. They’re an important set-up. I wouldn’t have got through the nightmare if it hadn’t been for those rooftop dancing-lessons. Neither of us would.

I don’t like to think much about how it started, though I didn’t technically do anything wrong.

Here’s the thing. It’s so unusual for me to dislike people that, when it does happen, I kind of refuse to believe it. I spend more time with them. I screen out whatever it is they’re doing to make me dislike them. I’ve been doing that with Chloe for years.

But this was worse, because there was more panic behind it. My instincts were telling me that I didn’t like Luka, but I beat them down. Plagg told me that I didn’t like Luka, but I was used to ignoring him, for the sake of my sanity, by then. 

So I started hanging out with Luka. I noticed all the amazing things about his character--there are a lot, but I’m not going to list them here. I noticed the way he looked at Marinette. _That_ felt like the beginning of an epiphany, so I concentrated on it, even though I didn’t, in any sense, actually _think_ about it.

I knew that what bothered me about him had something to do with Marinette, so I assumed, in my innocent way, that they were both lonely, and they’d be much happier if they got together. _Of course_ this weird feeling of mine had to be concern. What _else_ could it be?

And so I walked with Marinette, and told her how convinced I was that she and Luka would hit it off. I had _seen_ them hitting it off already, and the only reason it filled me with agitation was because it was incomplete.

“You’d be so good together,” I said. “You’re both smart and creative. And he’s so cool.”

“He’s not as cool as you,” she muttered. She actually said that. I mean, she said it to the ground, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at me--and, once she’d said it, she shoved me in a panicky way, and added, “You know, and lots of people. Lots of people are cool--he’s not the only one who’s cool--I don’t even know what cool means anymore.”

I laughed, because it was a very Marinette thing to say, and went back to digging my own grave.

“And it would be perfect, because Luka’s like my brother now, and I’ve always thought of you like a sister.”

Marinette stopped in her tracks, but she was too polite to stop smiling.

“You have?”

I think--I’m not positive, because I never look back on this moment if I can help it--but I _think_ I gathered up both her hands in mine and said:

“Of course. With you and Luka, it’s like I finally have a family. I never want anything to get in the way of that. And you’ll be best friends with Kagami too, I just know it.”

“Because _she_ feels like your sister?” said Marinette hopefully.

“No,” I said. “God, no, that would be weird. I couldn’t date someone who felt like my sister.”

Her voice was very faint now, her smile frozen. “Yeah. Yeah, that would be weird.”

She was blushing miserably. She wanted to go, but she didn’t know how to get out of this conversation without hurting my feelings. She shifted from foot to foot, and then said, in a voice that wobbled,

“I have to--would you just--I’ll see you later, OK?”

To be honest with you, I have said worse things to her. I have been more oblivious than that. Maybe it was just the last straw. Or maybe she didn’t have time to recover--Tikki didn’t have time to pour all that soothing positivity into her ears--because the akuma-victim struck five minutes after.

In my defence, if I was lying to her, I didn’t know it. But there was something about it that got through my obliviousness. I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong, but I understood that Marinette was upset. I had the tiniest impulse to go after her, flaring up in the dark like a little, beleaguered candle-flame. But then the akuma-victim struck.

He called himself Aftershock. A seismologist kicking his heels three hundred miles from the nearest tectonic rift. For seismologists, at least, this city is uncomfortably stable.

He made gigantic cracks and furrows run down the city streets, as if somebody was tunnelling underneath them. He shook the buildings until roof-tiles and aerials were dropping like hailstones from the sky. And when he waved his hands, you could see mad, zig-zagging squiggles in the air, like the read-out from a seismograph.

I couldn’t tell you what he looked like, except that his hair stood up on end like little black spines. When I look back on him--or when he turns up in my nightmares--I have a confused impression of some kind of devilish porcupine.

I should have realized sooner that something was up with Ladybug. Her eyes were red and her voice was scratchy, but I put it down to the dust from the collapsing buildings. Besides, there was too much damage control, too many civilians about to be squashed. I had to use the Cataclysm early on. A giant advertising billboard came loose from its moorings and was about to topple onto the street, flattening everyone within a hundred yards. I wasn’t strong enough to catch it, and there was no time to dodge, but I knew that, if I jumped up, claws-first, and touched it with the Cataclysm, it would disintegrate before it had a chance to squash anybody.

The billboard slammed into my hand--I felt a spasm of white-hot pain shoot down my arm--and then I fell with it, watching as the Cataclysm spread and the board turned into a cloud of black dust which showered the sidewalk--and me, as I slammed into it.

I wanted to lie there for a lot longer, but Ladybug pulled me up, flung her yo-yo, and hoisted us into the air.

Aftershock followed us, and we’d gone a few blocks before I realized that she was leading him into the warehouse district. All the buildings there were deserted, and frequently falling down anyway. She was trying to reduce the damage and the potential casualties.

God, she was clever! She knew the importance of choosing her own battleground. But she was still frowning in concentration, as if she was trying to keep something at bay.

“Are you OK, milady?” I said, cottoning on at last.

She shook her head sharply and turned to face Aftershock. He sent one of those ploughed-up furrows down the street to try and take the ground out from under us, but Ladybug leapt towards him, rather than away.

I guess the idea was to try and share the ground he was standing on, because it was the only place you could rely on to be stable, but it was still a masochistic gesture that should have rung alarm-bells in my head.

I followed her, vaulting onto Aftershock’s shoulders and searching through his clothes for any likely-looking objects that might contain the akuma. He threw me off once or twice, but I’m nothing if not persistent. Ask Ladybug.

Still, I could feel my five minutes ticking away. There was only one pad left on my ring, and pretty soon it would start flashing. So when Ladybug tore a piece of paper from his pocket and shredded it--when I saw the black wings of the akuma start to emerge from the shreds--I shouted, “Good job, gotta go!” and used my stick to vault the hell out of there. I thought we’d won. It was maybe a bit easier than usual--she hadn’t even used her lucky charm--but I wasn’t going to argue with a quick result, especially when I needed one so badly.

It was only later, when I watched the news from my opulent prison-cell of a bedroom, when I looked out of the window and saw the jagged outline of half-collapsed buildings against the setting sun, that I realized something must have gone wrong. There had been no miraculous red rush, restoring everything to normal. Paris was still cracked and gaping open. Which meant that something had happened to Ladybug.

I called her, but there was no answer. Plagg had no advice to offer. He was settling in for the night with his camembert, and was obviously torn between laziness and gloomy pessimism, because he said, “If she’s dead, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

It didn’t help my mental state.

Something was trying to get through to me--some memory of the way she’d looked before I left. It was squeezing all the air out of my lungs and making my fingers curl into fists.

I transformed--Plagg wasn’t happy about that--and went back to the place where I’d last seen her. I searched though a mile and a half of crumbling warehouses, hyperventilating the whole time, before I found him.

He’d been crouching in the dark above a door-frame, ready to leap down on me. He knocked me into the rubble and pinned me under his feet, wrenching my stick out of my hand. And even while I struggled against the weight on my back and tried to keep myself from passing out, I thought how strange it was that he wasn’t talking, wasn’t bargaining, wasn’t even trying to prise my ring off my finger. It dimly occurred to me that he had some bigger plan--or rather, Hawkmoth did--and Ladybug wasn’t here to help me figure it out.

He made the ground shake. I could feel the shock-waves passing from his feet through my body and into the rubble of the warehouse floor. A crack opened beneath me, and I dropped through into a cellar, landing on jagged chunks of stone.

I rolled over, looked up at the fissure I’d fallen through, but he was healing it up somehow, coaxing its edges together, sealing me inside. I doubt he even got the chance to hear me yell at him. A few pebbles rained down as the stone settled, and then I was alone with the echoes of my shout.

No, not alone. There was breathing--slow and steady, if a bit ragged--coming from the room behind me.

I turned, dreading what I would see. I wasn’t afraid of monsters. That breathing was too human, too soft, too _familiar,_ for an akuma-victim or one of its minions.

Sometimes I still wake up in the night and hear that breathing--I’m flooded with panic and horror and tenderness all at once--and I have to exert every fibre of my being to keep myself from shaking her awake to make sure she’s all right.


	4. The Tipping Point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continuing from the last chapter - lots of action and angst!

It was like a nightmare from the first moment. I’d never seen her costume damaged before. There were smudged red tears on her arms, burn-holes in the mask, tattered edges, as if it was only fabric.

To be honest, I’d never thought about what it was if it _wasn’t_ only fabric, but suddenly it occurred to me to wonder whether it was Tikki--or maybe Tikki’s spirit--stretched thin over Ladybug’s flesh. Maybe Tikki would be as scratched and battered as the costume when she transformed.

I wasn’t panicking yet. It was surreal--like the first, slowed-down moments after you drop a glass. Before the shattering, there’s a second where you think, ‘This can’t be happening to me. I’m an _adult_. I don’t drop things anymore’.

It was surreal to see Ladybug injured. I have seen this woman fighting on when one of her arms and one of her legs had been blurred out of existence. I have seen her running headlong into the jaws of a T-Rex and levering them open from the inside. She doesn’t lie down on the job. She doesn’t accept things. Her calmness unnerved me.

She was half-buried under the rubble--some kind of column had collapsed on top of her. I was too dumb to think at first, and tried to lift it. Then, when it wouldn’t budge--when she said “Kitty” in her most soothing, reasonable voice--something snapped in me. I reached for the Cataclysm and disintegrated the pillar on top of her. I think I would have disintegrated anything that was preventing me from getting to her at that moment. It didn’t occur to me that I was squandering the only weapon I had left.

Even after the pillar crumbled to dust, there was a kind of echo--a rumbling, like distant thunder. It was in the rubble underfoot and the impenetrable ceiling above us. The building was about to collapse.

Weirdly, it didn’t unsettle me as much as the thought of what I might see under the pillar when the dust of the Cataclysm fell away. But she was--well, she was intact. Her leg was bent at an odd angle, and I could see more torn costume and bloodied skin, but everything seemed to be attached.

“Can you walk?”

It was a dumb question, but she wasn’t even feeling well enough to roll her eyes at me. “Help me sit up,” she said.

I didn’t want to move her, so I dragged over a cinder-block and tried to prop her up against it. I was breathing fast--the dust kept getting caught in the back of my throat. I tried to straighten her leg, but she took a sharp breath and shook her head. I knelt down and examined it instead, turning my head to look at it from every angle, willing it to yield up some diagnosis other than the obvious.

“Are you a first-aider?” she asked.

“No, but I know a broken leg when I see one.”

“I’m impressed,” she said, with a small smile. It only made me angry.

“What happened? I thought you had the akuma!”

Her smile disappeared. “There were hostages. The ceiling was about to come down, I couldn’t…” She trailed off, and then shook herself, as if she was trying to cling onto consciousness. “But it must have been some kind of trick--either that, or they were _his_ people. Oh Kitty, I haven’t messed up this bad since my first day on the job!”

“It’s OK,” I said breathlessly. To be honest, I was in no condition to take in what she was telling me. My eyes kept moving from her injured leg to the dark, unbroken ceiling above us. Not a single chink of light was showing through. I had good night-vision, but I couldn’t see a way out of here. I could hear running water down below--we were probably above the catacombs of the old city--but without the Cataclysm, or at least a pick-axe, I didn’t know how to get down there. Aftershock had my stick. And I was going to transform in four minutes.

“It’s OK,” I said again, scanning the walls for loose bricks or secret passages. “It’s going to be OK, Ladybug.”

She interrupted me--as brisk and impatient as ever. “I’ve got a plan.”

I sagged with relief. “Oh, thank God.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

I looked back at her, my eyes narrowed. I realized suddenly that her earrings were flashing. She must have used her Lucky Charm, not too long ago. But I couldn’t see--and right now, couldn’t imagine--a red and black spotted object that would miraculously get us out of this.

“Well?” I said. 

She tried to lean towards me, and then grimaced. Oh great, I thought. Broken ribs too.

“Only one of us can get out of here, Kitty.”

I knew just from that. I’m good at following her train of thought, filling in her half-spoken plans in my head. I knew what she was asking me to do. If I hadn’t been struggling against the panic and the rawness in my throat, I would have yelled at her.

“You can’t get me out,” she went on. “I can’t climb, I can’t walk. There’s a hatch leading down into the catacombs, but you’d have to drag me through miles of tunnels, and I doubt we’d get that far before the ceiling collapsed on top of us. But you can leave, and take my Miraculous. If you stay here with me, Hawkmoth gets them both.”

“No,” I said sulkily, “if I stay here with you, I can fight him.”

She shook her head. “Nobody’s coming in here, Kitty. The building’s about to collapse--they won’t risk it. They can just wait until this place comes crashing down and then comb through the rubble for our bodies. That’s what I’d do.”

“You would never,” I snapped.

“Well, it’s what I’d do if I wasn’t so nice,” she muttered. She was looking at the rubble-strewn floor now, as if she was afraid to meet my eyes. “There’s something else. I think Tikki was injured at the same time I was. I need you to take her to Master Fu to be healed. She could die if she stays here with me--”

“ _You_ could die!” I protested.

“But Tikki’s the only one who can capture Hawkmoth’s akumas. Anyone can be Ladybug, but Ladybug’s powers have to survive, or no-one will ever be able to fight him--”

I shook my head again. I would have done anything to get her to stop talking. This all sounded too cold, too rehearsed. She was talking like a martyr--not the warm, quick-witted Ladybug I knew and loved. It was like she was already dead.

And I couldn’t tell her, could I, that I had lost my mother and was terrified of losing someone I loved again? Could she work out my identity just from that? Maybe not, but there was no time to get into a therapy session with her, even if I knew how to talk about it.

I was tempted to just pick her up and start running, but I didn’t want to wrench her damaged leg. Plus, it’s hard to resist her when she tells me what to do. I’ve kind of been trained to obey her--I guess all of Paris has. It’s usually a very good idea. But I didn’t trust her to do the right thing this time. Not the right thing for _her_ , anyway. 

I got up and started pacing, hoping that something would come to me if I moved--or at least hoping that I could find that trap-door to the catacombs, so that I knew where it was. Something told me she wasn’t going to show it to me unless I agreed to her plan.

“There’s something wrong,” she muttered, tense and frowning, as she followed my motion with her eyes. “This is more than you not wanting to leave me--more even than you being afraid I’ll die. What’s the matter with you?”

“What’s the matter with _you_?” I yelled, coming to a halt and rounding on her. “You never compromise like this--you never give up! What’s happened to you to make you think there’s no way out?”

She flinched back, but didn’t look away from me. “All right,” she said. “Maybe something _has_ happened. But that doesn’t change our situation. There was a time for refusing to compromise, and it was before I got trapped in here!” 

“What did he do to you this time?” I said, almost too angry to speak.

It was the man she was in love with--it was always him, whenever her mind wasn’t on the job, whenever she made a mistake, whenever she flirted with despair. It was always him. He had found ways of ruining my life that I couldn’t have imagined, but he’d never gone this far before.

“It’s not his fault,” she said--and she sounded weary now.

Maybe she didn’t have the energy to figure out why it wasn’t his fault--or she knew she’d never convince me anyway--because she didn’t say any more. Instead, she reached up and started fumbling with her earrings.

“No--” I said, shaking my head desperately. I think I even grabbed her hands and tried to prise them away from her ears. “Ladybug, don’t!”

She gave me her cool, blue, honest, unflinching look. It didn’t fool me for a moment. I knew she was scared. The problem was, fear had never stopped her from doing anything before.

“I’ve only got a minute left before I transform anyway,” she said. “I’ve thought about it from every angle, Kitty. There’s no other way. Plus, the Lucky Charm gave me this--” she fumbled in the wreckage beside her and brought out a red-and-black spotted crash-helmet. “I’m supposed to stay here. There’s only one way to get Tikki out--and if Tikki doesn’t get out, nobody is ever going to be able to fight Hawkmoth again.”

I shut my eyes--half in panic, and half out of some bizarre sense of decency. It felt wrong to look at her transforming--like I was watching her getting undressed.

The insides of my eyelids blazed with the light of the transformation, and then it was dark again. I could feel her taking my hand, pressing something pointed into my palm--the earrings, I supposed. I just let them lie there. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to clench them tight or throw them at her.

“It’s OK,” she whispered. “You can look. I want you to.”

I opened my eyes, but she was still Ladybug. She just wasn’t wearing the mask or the costume.

I think that was what made me angriest, when I looked back on it later--the rightness of it, the _obviousness_ of it. She had Ladybug’s eyes, Ladybug’s determined pout, Ladybug’s hairstyle, Ladybug’s figure, Ladybug’s kindness and her sudden, adorable changes of mood. And she was Marinette.

There was no transformation. Marinette had been there all along, just as Ladybug had been there all along--every time I sat next to her in class, every time she stared and fidgeted and garbled her words around me.

Still, the rightness of it freaked me out more than any dramatic transformation. If she had turned out to be a werewolf--a zombie--a crazed half-insect lady--it couldn’t have scared me more than it did to see the sweet, china-cheeked face of Marinette.

My breath caught in the back of my throat. I pressed a hand to my mouth. She must have seen my reaction and mistaken it for incredulity, because she smiled and said, “I know, right? Who would ever believe someone so clumsy and disastrous could be Ladybug? You know, this could work, Kitty. Say they find me in the wreckage of this building without my miraculous? What do they really know? That I’ve been found in the same place Ladybug disappeared? It doesn’t prove anything. Maybe I’ll seem like such an unlikely superhero that they’ll let me go.”

I shook my head again. I didn’t know what it all meant. My thoughts were hopping about, trying not to look at anything directly, trying not to linger on any one fact for too long. She was Marinette. It was obvious, and yet it was unthinkable. I couldn’t lose them both.

And all the things it might mean if I accepted she was Marinette – all the things I’d been ignoring – including that one big thing, still fresh in my memory: Marinette upset, shifting from foot to foot, blushing miserably and trying to get away from me. I’d hurt her somehow. Right before this all happened. 

It was trying to make sense, but I wouldn’t let it. I could feel the facts tugging at each other, like magnets trying to connect, but I held them apart, still desperately shaking my head. “This is worse,” I said. “I can’t just--”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, it’s harder to leave me now you know I’m a civilian?”

“You’re not just a civilian!” I shouted. “You’re Marinette!”

A curtain of pebbles and dust fell down from the ceiling, loosened by my voice. She started coughing, but she was still angry. “I get it,” she croaked. “Now you know I’m clumsy, disastrous Marinette--”

“No,” I said, trying to yank my voice down by a few decibels. “Now I know you’re sweet, kind Marinette--”

“But I always was,” she insisted. “And I saved the world with you more times than I can remember. Listen to me, Kitty. Sweet, kind Marinette is not to be underestimated.” She tried to smile. “Particularly not when they akumatize me.”

“I can’t leave you,” I said, my voice ragged with the dust.

“Yes you can. They’ll turn me, and you will fight me, and you will win.” She was speaking very slowly, almost through gritted teeth, and I wondered whether she was in pain or whether this part was just really hard for her to say. “I don’t tell you this often enough, Kitty, but you are very, very good at your job.”

She held out her hand to me, and I saw Tikki, looking just as soot-blackened as Ladybug’s costume had been before the transformation. Her antennae were bent and crumpled. Her eyes were closed.

“This is Tikki,” said Marinette. “Please take care of her.” Her voice softened a bit—and then, because she’d been keeping softness at bay for so long, she faltered. “I – she – she’s been my only friend. At times.”

“Ladybug,” I said, reaching for her shoulder, but she sniffed and straightened and smiled.

“There’s so much I want to tell you,” she whispered. “So much I’ve _always_ wanted to tell you – so many messages I’d like you to take, in case I--”

She stopped herself – I don’t know if it was for her benefit or for mine – and sniffed again.

“No, you know what? Everyone I love already knows how I feel about them.” Again, her mouth took on that tight, tense look, as if she was trying to clamp down on the words before she spoke them. “Except for Adrien,” she said. “Tell Adrien Agreste that I love him.”

I turned cold. Something prickled across my skin, as if Plagg was shuddering. 

“What?”

She pulled me close and flicked the bell on my collar, smiling like the old Ladybug.

“Love you too, Kitty,” she whispered.

She let me go – and I realized that her grip had been the only thing keeping me upright. While she’d been holding me spellbound – horrified – enthralled – she had managed to manoeuvre me over the hatch that led down to the basement. She let me go now, and I dropped like a stone. And even after I splashed into the tunnels beneath – even after I heard the hatch slam above me and I leapt up, hammering at it, fighting back the panic, shouting God-knows-what – I went on falling. There were only seconds between that moment and the building’s collapse, but I swear, I was blundering around in those seconds for an eternity.

Marinette loved me. I could see all the consequences of that, rolling out in front of me. I followed them like a line of toppling dominoes, from one horror to another.

I’d been hurting her. For months. I had said I loved her like a sister. I’d asked her to come on my date with Kagami.

The two women I loved more than anything on earth were the same woman, and I could lose them both in the same second, just like I’d lost my mother. I _was_ losing them both – it was already happening – and I couldn’t get back up there.

The tunnels flooded with the collapse of the building. There were metal rungs embedded in the rock underneath the hatch, and I hooked my legs through them to keep myself from being swept away, as Tikki and the earrings were still clenched in my fists. I swam up and rammed my shoulder against the hatch, trying to force it upwards, the breath burning in my lungs. It almost gave way. I opened one of my hands to lever it up, and then lost half my breath in a stream of bubbles when I realized I’d let go of Tikki, and she was being swept away on the current.

I leapt after her, caught her, bundled her onto a ledge out of the water and waited, eyes stinging with frustration, until I saw her take a breath.

“I’ll be back,” I said, already turning to dive into the water.

I heard her stir and struggle to speak. “Cat Noir…”

“Two seconds, Tikki, two seconds – I’m not leaving her.”

I dived under again, but it was pitch black now – I couldn’t see the hatch or any of the pieces of half-broken timber swirling around in the water, trying to skewer me. I tried to plough through anyway, desperate to do something, convinced I could make out some kind of light in the murk ahead of me. But this time the current snatched me up and rammed my head against a cinder-block. I surfaced, spluttering, and heard Tikki’s voice.

“Cat Noir, we have to go!”

“Two seconds,” I said – or tried to say, but the water was caught in my throat, and it came out more as coughing.

“Cat Noir, she’s right. We can’t save her now, but maybe we can save her later.”

I wanted to tell her that ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough, but I could see the consequences of _that_ unrolling in front of me too. I’d get her killed. And then nobody would be able to fight Hawkmoth ever again. 

All around us, chunks of the tunnel ceiling were tumbling down and splashing into the water. My teeth were chattering. I couldn’t tell if it was the sudden dark or the bump on my head, but my vision kept cutting out, like a bad TV signal.

It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do. It went against every instinct in my body. I had to grit my teeth against every horrible thought that occurred to me down there in the dark, as we waded through the collapsing tunnels. She might be dead already. Hawkmoth might be pawing all over her, going through her pockets, looking for her miraculous. He might not find her at all. She might be alone, conscious, dying by inches, with no-one beside her.

When we struggled up through a manhole cover and emerged, shivering, onto the Rue Petrarque, I looked back at the wreckage. I was still holding Tikki as gently as I could, but my other hand was clenched hard around the earrings. I could feel their points digging into my skin.

“She’s alive,” Tikki mumbled. Her voice was faint but full of conviction. “I can feel it.”

I forced myself to breathe, but my chest was too tight to let much air in. I was still blundering through dark tunnels.

I turned my back on the wreckage, and staggered through the streets to Master Fu’s house. At some point I transformed – I don’t think I even had the wherewithal to duck into a doorway – and Plagg perched on my shoulder, peering anxiously down at Tikki. He was ragged with exhaustion too, but he didn’t ask for cheese.

When we reached Master Fu’s doorway, I hammered on it, torn between urgency and the terror that I would give him away somehow, and bring yet more trouble to my loved ones. Anyway, the urgency won out. I pounded on the door until I couldn’t stand upright anymore. I could feel the ground sucking at me, slowing everything down, as if I was still wading through those flooded tunnels. I slid down with my back against the door until I was sitting on the front step.

“Tikki,” I said, blinking frantically in an effort to clear my head. “Don’t let me fall asleep.”

I opened one shaky hand to look at her, but she was already unconscious. I supposed Plagg was asleep too, because he was uncharacteristically silent. I didn’t want to look at him to find out. He had known all along. He’d let me break Marinette’s heart. If I could have summoned up the energy, I would have shaken him. But I didn’t have anything left. I was ready to die on that door-step. And when the door opened, and I fell backwards into the hall, I passed out before I even hit the floor.


	5. Tea and Butterflies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More angsty Cat Noir and badass Marinette! Cat Noir will get a chance to be badass soon, don't worry!

When I woke up, there was sunlight, and the smell of jasmine tea. I stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment, trying to work out whether it had just been a really intense nightmare. But the ceiling wasn’t _my_ ceiling--it didn’t stretch up for fifteen metres and end in an ornate chandelier--so I knew something was off.

I sat up so fast that my vision blurred, rolled out of bed, and managed to land on my feet. What kind of person would let me sleep until morning--and make himself a pot of _tea_ \--when Ladybug was out there, pinned under falling cinder-blocks, maybe already in Hawkmoth’s clutches?

Or maybe not. That was worse, wasn’t it? Because he wouldn’t bother to capture a corpse.

I marched downstairs--I don’t think I even stopped to check that I was dressed--and opened doors at random, fallowing the scent of jasmine tea. I found Master Fu in his study, kneeling beside a pallet-bed that contained Tikki. Some of the soot had been cleaned off her skin, but her antennae were still bent. 

I have no idea if Master Fu tried to speak to me. I went straight to Tikki, kneeling down beside her bed and leaning over her in a way that was probably gentle and frantic at the same time.

“Tikki,” I whispered. “Is she alive?”

Tikki stirred, but didn’t open her eyes. “No--I--I don’t know. I can’t feel anything.”

I put my hands over my mouth, but I could feel the desperation burning in my eyes instead. It would get out somehow.

“Please, Tikki,” I managed to say.

For a very, very long time, she didn’t answer me. She was whispering feverishly, but I couldn’t string the noises into words, no matter how hard I tried. I was sagging by that point, curling up around the pain, but I still took a deep, stupid, hopeful breath when her eyelids fluttered open.

“Wait,” she said. “Yes. It’s dark. She can’t tell if her eyes are open. And there are things fluttering through the air above her, landing on her. Butterflies.”

I stood up so fast that my vision blurred again, and rounded on Master Fu, who was arranging glazed, handle-less teacups on a tray.

“He’s got her,” I said. “Hawkmoth.”

Master Fu didn’t look up at me immediately. He must have wanted to get those cups just right. I had a sudden urge to pick them up and hurl them against the wall.

“If she’s alive, then we won’t have long to wait,” he said grimly. “He will akumatize her before Tikki has recovered, because he knows that only Tikki’s power can save her.”

“But she’s--she’s injured too. Her leg’s broken. He can’t--” I stopped, realizing how little I wanted him to answer this question. “Can he?”

“I imagine,” said Master Fu, “that he will give her some kind of flying ability. That way she’ll still be able to get around. As for the rest, it won’t concern him. It might even make things easier. The weaker she is, the more susceptible she will be to his control.”

I reached out for something to steady myself. My hand found the teapot, and it took me a long time to realize that it was hot. Even then, I snatched my hand away slowly, as if I was moving through water. “He’s evil,” I said.

“He’s desperate,” said Master Fu. “Just like you.” He lifted the lid of the teapot and stared thoughtfully into its depths. “Your emotional signatures are almost indistinguishable now…”

I couldn’t take much of this in--though it turned out to be important later. I bunched my hands up into fists and said, “Plagg, claws out.”

It was only then that I noticed the lightness of my right hand--the strange, naked feeling that comes from the absence of something you’ve worn day and night for months. There was no ring. And no Plagg.

For a moment, I was too bewildered to be angry. I didn’t see what cause this old man had to make my life even harder than it already was. I looked at my finger and said, “Did…did you take my ring?”

“I need to talk to you,” said Master Fu.

“There’s no time--you said it yourself!”

“There is always time to stop and think. You think _she_ would go charging off like this?”

That quietened me--though it didn’t exactly calm me.

“Well?” I said, tightening my lips.

“I think Hawkmoth has unwittingly stumbled upon your worst nightmare.”

For some reason, that made me even angrier. Maybe it was the thought of Hawkmoth ‘unwittingly stumbling’ into this--as if he hadn’t _meant_ it. As if he hadn’t trapped her and used the akuma-victim to bring down the building on top of us. As if he wasn’t keeping her in the dark.

I clenched my jaw in an effort to keep my voice steady, and said, “My worst nightmares were never as elaborate as this.”

“Well, exactly. You are afraid of losing someone you love again. He can sense it. Even _I_ can sense it, and I don’t have his powers. I think he might use it against you--or possibly against Marinette.”

I stared at him. It was the first time he had ever used her real name to me. It was the first time since I’d woken up that I’d allowed myself to think of her as Marinette instead of Ladybug.

It lashed out at me again--my sweet friend, soft-hearted and sensitive and fourteen years old--lying abandoned in the dark. And before that--all the things that I now knew she had suffered because of me. It was too much. I wasn’t old enough for this. Why in God’s name had he picked two teenagers to be superheroes in the first place?

I think I would have sunk to my knees if Tikki hadn’t been there. Even in her feverish state, she was sensitive to other people’s feelings. She half-sat up on her pallet-bed and whispered, “She’s not afraid. She trusts us. He won’t find it easy to akumatize her.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Master Fu.

I narrowed my eyes. “You think he’ll try to akumatize _me_?”

“I think he will use your negative emotions to akumatize Marinette.”

“Can he do that?”

Master Fu heaved his shoulders into a shrug. “With certain, closely-aligned people. Brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, partners. Your despair will prove too tempting a target for him to ignore, and he only needs to find an answering chord of despair in Marinette, no matter how small--” he looked away from me “--or how well-hidden.”

He probably thought he was being tactful, but his words slammed into me like a wrecking-ball. How could Hawkmoth fail to find an answering chord of despair in her? She’d been in love with someone who didn’t love her back for years--someone too oblivious to pick up on her feelings, someone who pestered her for romantic advice and forced her to come on his dates with other women.

Oh God, it was never finished. There was always some new angle to this nightmare--some fresh, horrific realization that could make it even worse.

“I want my ring back,” I said faintly.

“If you were me,” said Master Fu, “would you give the power of destruction to someone so angry?”

I straightened up. “If you don’t give it to me, I’ll go and fight him on my own. As Adrien. And I’ll be killed, that’s certain. What you have to decide is whether you want one certain death on your conscience or lots of _un_ certain ones.” I held out my hand for the ring. I was suddenly sure he wouldn’t refuse to give it to me. “You trusted me once,” I said. “I don’t think you abandon your trust that easily.”

He smiled. It was a very weary, watery-eyed smile, and as soon as he’d given into it, he turned sharply and started to pour the tea. I realized for the first time that he was powerfully upset--it was just that he was old, and used to conserving his energies. He didn’t get upset in the same way I did. It didn’t mean he was heartless.

“Well,” he said stiffly, “you are correct, so far as it goes. I never intended to keep the ring from you. And I’m quite sure that, if I had tried, Plagg would have found a way to steal it and sneak it back to you.”

He glanced at the record-player, where Plagg was sitting, almost invisible on the black lacquer-work. He was curled up in his usual sulky pose, but he wasn’t sulking. His ears were pricked up, his muscles tensed, as if he’d been preparing himself to spring. I didn’t know what he had been about to do--snatch the ring, claw Master Fu’s face, or hold me back if I tried to attack him--but I knew he had been about to do it for my sake.

“I needed to make you stop and think,” Master Fu continued. “Hawkmoth thinks he is torturing you, by forcing your loved one to embody your worst fears, but he is actually giving you an opportunity. If you can control your fear, you can control the akuma-victim.”

I wanted to laugh and say ‘Simple as that, is it?’ But I wanted that ring, so I kept my mouth shut.

He dropped it into my palm, and Plagg flew to me, perching on my shoulder and giving it a little, reassuring squeeze with his claws. I tried not to look at him. I didn’t know that I’d forgiven him for letting me break Marinette’s heart. But I felt better, all the same.

“You have a plan?” said Master Fu.

“Yes,” I said, sliding the ring onto my finger and clenching my hand to keep it there. “No. I don’t know.”

I had the beginnings of a plan, but there was a huge blank space in the middle of it--the space that I guessed Marinette was going to occupy. I didn’t know what she would look like--what powers she would have--what it would do to me to see her animated by my own despair. You couldn’t plan for something like that.

“I need the others,” I said, “but I don’t know how to find them. I don’t know who any of them are, except for Chloe.”

“Leave that to me,” said Master Fu. “I suggest you go home, try to eat something, check in with the people who will be worrying about you.” He caught my surly look and smiled. “That is, the people who will notice your absence. Believe me, you’ll know when it has started.”

I nodded. The thought of eating turned my stomach, but I needed something to keep me on my feet. And even the huge, marble-floored, empty house, even the thought of seeing my father--or _not_ seeing him, which is the usual situation these days--seemed comforting to me now.

I don’t hate him, you know. His arms are chilly and his expectations are immense, but in one way, at least, I’ve never disappointed him. I’m good-looking. He thinks that’s a virtue--better than courage, _way_ better than kindness.

In a way, it’s easy to see how you could equate good looks with being a good person. All my life, people have beamed at me--gasped at me--exclaimed ‘Oh, how adorable!’ Everywhere I went, they were glad to see me--sometimes _too_ glad, but I was seldom around them for long enough to realize that. I thought everyone was warm and kind and full of joy. My first photo-shoot, when I was five, I didn’t even notice the camera. I was just playing in the park with my mother. I knew I was wearing special clothes and I wasn’t allowed to get them dirty, but I was having so much fun that I was barely aware of anything else. The photographer said afterwards that, if joy could have broken a camera lens, he would have found out that day.

That was how it was until my mother disappeared. I’d known nothing but joy and kindness and comfort all my life, and suddenly--overnight--the joy and kindness were gone, and the comfort wasn’t all that comforting.

So, in order to keep the darkness from rushing in, everything--every question, every thought, every scrap of curiosity in my head--rushed out.

It all had to come back now--I had to out-think Marinette. And I didn’t care if it brought the darkness with it.

***

Light flooded into the room too quickly. Mechanical blinds slid back, like a pupil dilating, until the ceiling above her was bright with sky-coloured glass. She winced and narrowed her eyes. She’d been staring up into the darkness for a long time, trying to make out shapes, trying to follow the movement of the pale-winged butterflies, and now the light was like a thousand little pins jabbing into her eyes.

There was no need to look, anyway. She knew what she would see.

“Can you feel it, Ladybug?” said a voice above her. “His terror and despair? He’s lost someone he loves before, I think. He knows he won’t survive it a second time. I can sympathize with that.”

Slowly, Marinette tried to ease her eyelids open. Her lips were papery-dry, but she thought she could probably try speaking.

“Who are you talking about?” she said. “Did--did you just call me Ladybug?”

The figure standing over her--the only dark thing in the room now--appeared to hesitate. She saw him turn his head, as if he was looking at someone in the doorway, just out of her eye-line. Mayura, presumably--although maybe he had other allies. Maybe the room was full of henchmen, lurking just out of sight. It didn’t matter. She had no daring, James-Bond-style escape plans. That kind of thing was for people whose legs weren’t broken. She had only one plan: to seem as young and frightened and clueless as possible. It didn’t involve much acting.

“All right,” said Hawkmoth, after a while. “Let’s play it your way. Your name, Mademoiselle?”

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng. I’m a high-school student at L’ecole Voltaire.”

There was a short, uneasy cough, perhaps from the figure in the doorway. Hawkmoth ignored it.

“And you were probably in the ruins of that warehouse because you were doing a school project on structural engineering, yes?”

Marinette blinked, as if she was bewildered by his sarcasm. “My friend runs the Lady-blog,” she said. “I thought I could get her some pictures.”

“And your camera?”

“You mean my phone? It’s somewhere…” She moved her arm, as if she expected her phone to be on the table-top beside her. “Please, I need to go to a hospital. My leg--”

“You won’t feel any pain soon,” said Hawkmoth. “Only power.”

There was another cough. Clearly, Mayura was doubtful about all this. Marinette wondered whether she could use that.

“Do you know how I know you’re Ladybug?” said Hawkmoth, leaning down very suddenly, with a smile that sparkled. “I can sense other people’s emotions, I don’t know if you knew that? And you’re very frightened--that’s not an act--but you’re keeping it tightly reined-in, as if you’re trying not to attract the attention of my akumas. How many high-school students would know to do that?”

Marinette gave him a smile of her own. It cracked her dry lips, but she didn’t care. “I’m clever,” she conceded. “I’m not Ladybug.”

“We’ll see,” said Hawkmoth, straightening up. “If Cat Noir turns up to face me on his own, we’ll know, won’t we?”

“Still seems pretty circumstantial to me,” she muttered.

Hawkmoth smiled again--this time, perhaps, a little unwillingly.

“In other circumstances, Mademoiselle, I’m sure we would have liked each other.”

“The circumstances are entirely of your own making. Sir.”

She saw him opening his mouth, and then closing it, as if he was wondering how much to tell her. He must have known that, if she was Ladybug, her plan would be to keep him talking for as long as possible, to give Tikki more time to recover. But it seemed he couldn’t help himself. Maybe something happened to you when you put on the costume of a supervillain. You had an irresistible urge to reveal your plans and try to justify yourself.

“In any case,” he said, staring reflectively at the head of his cane. “You don’t need to worry about keeping the fear under wraps. I’m not going to use _yours_.”

Marinette tried not to follow him. She knew that, if she understood, she wouldn’t be able to keep herself from feeling a prickle of unease. But she had never been able to switch her brain off, no matter how tired she was. Or how much pain she was in.

“What are you-?”

“Cat Noir’s emotions are far more intense, and I think I can tie them to you. All I need is to find an answering current of despair in you. Buried deep, perhaps. Hidden for years. Baited and starved and longing to escape.”

He leaned down, and for a moment, she could swear he was looking _through_ her. Right into her head--or worse, her heart. She tried to unfocus her eyes, take a breath, clear her mind of all thoughts, but she was still aching and bruised from the conversation with Adrien. She could feel it singing out, even above the pain of her leg and ribs. There was no way Hawkmoth could miss it.

His smile broadened, and he reached out a hand, tracing it over her sweat-soaked forehead. “Yes. There it is. The despair of loving someone who doesn’t return your feelings. How carefully you’ve hidden it, ignored it, argued with it, overpowered it. And yet, for all your efforts, it runs so deep, it’s practically the core of you. What couldn’t I do if I tied Cat Noir’s raw, ungoverned terror to a current as deep as that?”

“One thing’s for sure,” said Marinette, doing her best to meet his eyes. “You wouldn’t be able to control what you called up.”

“We’ll see,” said Hawkmoth. “I have an affinity with despair.”

“Do you think it’s your friend?” she demanded. She was starting to lose her composure now--starting to feel the anger. There didn’t seem much point in keeping it under anymore. “Despair doesn’t work for anybody. All it wants is to bring about as much pain and suffering as possible.”

She shook her head, forced herself to meet his eyes again. She tried to summon up Tikki, her parents, even Adrien--all the people who told her to look for the best in others. With an effort, she softened her voice.

“Please. You’ve never killed anybody before--I can’t believe you ever meant to. This is going to go bad so quickly, and there will be no-one to help you.”

Hawkmoth’s smile disappeared. The softness in her voice surprised him so much that he actually took a step backwards. For a moment, he looked lost, child-like, unbalanced.

He glanced again at the figure in the doorway, as if seeking reassurance. Whatever he saw there, it straightened his back and hardened his resolve. He said, “I’ll never get another chance like this.”

Marinette breathed out slowly. “Let’s get on with it, then.”


	6. Chaos and Control

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adrien preparing to fight an akumatized Marinette who's being animated by his own despair (poor guy!) Actual fighting is coming, but was taking ages, so I thought I might as well post the prelude!

The house was more deserted than usual. I couldn’t even find Nathalie. I found a pad on her desk and wrote her a note, saying that I was going to the movies and was taking my bodyguard. Then I found the bodyguard and told him my father was giving him an unscheduled day off.

He looked pretty dubious, but I pointed out that he was leaving me in the most heavily-guarded house in Paris. I made sure he saw me activate the electric gate, and the spikes that shoot out of the walls to discourage any would-be climbers. He eventually left, looking back at me all the way down the street. I tried to feel grateful—rather than annoyed—that he was so concerned about my safety.

I looked in at the dining room, with its big, lonely table and its array of breakfast items. Even when Nathalie wasn’t there to oversee my meal-times, the chef always made sure there was food. But I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as food. I was probably going to regret it later. And I still had to feed Plagg his ripe, pungent camembert, which would be like being in the same room as the most aggressive food in the world, without even obtaining any nourishment from it.

I went back to my room and shut the door. Plagg was on the bed, curled possessively around his cheese, but not eating it. He had that same tense, expectant look he had worn at Master Fu’s house, when he’d been waiting for me to do something desperate. It wasn’t a bad bet—then or now.

It was too soon to transform—any anyway, Plagg needed to eat. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that. I could barely bring myself to look at him.

I started pacing instead, past the grand piano and the widescreen TV, in and out of the en suite bathroom. At some point, Plagg flew up and started following me around, hovering anxiously at my elbow.

“So…” he said, in a small voice. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking there’s a lot you could have told me.”

Plagg hung his head. “There isn’t,” he muttered.

“You knew she was Marinette.”

“Yes.”

“Did you know Marinette was in love with me?”

“With Adrien?” he said, as if it was an important distinction. “Yes.”

I hesitated before asking the next question, trying to get my voice as steady as I could make it.

“Did you know _I_ was in love with Marinette?”

“Yes. So did you, actually. You just didn’t _know_ you knew.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what that means,” I snapped. “How could you let me lose her like that?”

“You can never lose her.”

I narrowed my eyes in exasperation. “What do you think is _happening_ right now? You let me--” 

“ _Let_ you? I didn’t tell you to say the things you said to her!”

“You weren’t exactly whispering helpful hints in my ears! All you care about is yourself—your own entertainment! You see these things that could save me or break me, and you think, ‘I’ll see how long it takes him to figure it out on his own. It’s more fun to watch him suffer.’”

“You,” said Plagg softly, “are not the one who suffered.”

I stopped short, as if he’d slapped me, but he had already lowered his head onto his paws, and was looking as sheepish as it’s possible for a cat-spirit to look.

“Adrien…”

“I know,” I said, in a ragged voice. “I’m sorry too. But you--” I waved my hands wildly “--you couldn’t have given me some kind of hint?”

“Five hundred,” said Plagg. “I gave you literally five hundred hints. And you knew what I was dreading. This--” he waved a paw at the window, and the deceptively beautiful day outside. “This always happens when creation and destruction get too close to each other.”

I stopped my pacing again. “You said it’s worse at the start,” I muttered, trying to remember our conversation in the car on the way back from Marinette’s picnic. “What did you call it? The tipping-point? Does that mean it gets better? Do Ladybug and Cat Noir ever _survive_ the tipping-point?”

I wanted to add, ‘Do they ever get to be together?’ But it sounded childish, after the previous question. Besides, her survival was enough. I could give her up if it meant she would live through this, even if it involved breaking her heart. Again.

“They’ve survived on occasion,” said Plagg. “Believe it or not, the times when they _didn’t_ were bad enough for me to never want to risk it again.”

He lowered his head onto his paws and stared sombrely at his wedge of cheese. “That’s what I meant when I said you couldn’t lose her. She’s the other half of your soul. Like me with Tikki. Unknowingly breaking her heart, dating other women—none of those things are going to take her out of your life. They couldn’t. But the two of you can still die. When you get too close to each other, that’s a real danger. I don’t know if you’ve ever bothered to consider it, but a six-thousand-year-old Kwami can get pretty hung-up on his master’s mortality. So I hope you can understand why I was a bit ambivalent about your happily-ever-after. I loved you enough that I still _hinted_. That was the best I could do.”

I sat down on the side of the bed and nudged the cheese towards him, trying to muster a smile. “Thank you, Plagg. I mean it.”

“The other thing…” he said slowly. “What Master Fu said about controlling your fear…”

I shrugged, even though my shoulders felt as if they were being weighed down with anvils. “I just need to get up there, right? I’m always happy when I’m up there.”

Plagg didn’t say anything, so I went on, “Why? Do you have any tips?”

“Not really my area of expertise,” he said. “I’m chaos, not control.”

“Have you ever had a master who used the Cataclysm on people?”

It wasn’t a complete change of subject. It occurred to me that, if he was chaos, then _I_ was supposed to be control, and I wasn’t sure how well-qualified I was for that job at the moment. I didn’t know what I would do to Hawkmoth if I saw him now. 

“Oh yeah,” said Plagg. His voice was heavy, but also kind of wistful.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“Pretty much what you’d expect.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s not pretty.”

I could see it in my mind’s eye. Once or twice, I had even dreamed about it--and then woken up bewildered, because as far as I knew then, I didn’t have any ill-feelings towards anybody.

“I’ll never do that,” I said--more for my benefit than for his.

But Plagg lifted his head and gave me a strange, sharp-toothed smile. “Let’s not make any promises yet. We don’t know what he’s done to her.”

I clenched my hand on my lap and then, with an effort, straightened it out again. “We’re going to get her back, Plagg.”

He didn’t say anything, but he shut his eyes, as if the world was suddenly back on course, and I realized he had been trying to get me to say that all along. I had to believe it, didn’t I, if I was going to succeed? I _did_ believe it, I just didn’t know what it would cost yet. I didn’t know that I _cared_ what it would cost either.

I nudged the cheese towards him again. “Eat something, Plagg. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

***

But still, nothing happened. The day went on being sunny and peaceful. The broken-down buildings left over from Aftershock’s rampage were the only hint that something was amiss.

Nobody had noticed Ladybug’s absence yet. I wondered vaguely if anyone had noticed Marinette’s. Would her parents be worried? Would Alya be waiting for her outside the school, leaving impatient voice-mails? Would Nino be waiting for _me_? Would the two of them be cooking up stories about how we’d probably skipped school together for a romantic tryst?

I wished they were right. I wished Alya and Nino were in charge of the narrative of the world.

I met Rena Rouge, Carapace and Queen Bee on the roof of an office-block overlooking the Pont Neuf. It was bright, glaring noon by then. There were fluffy white clouds in the sky. There was even birdsong. It felt like such an insult—such a grotesque parody of normality—like a chicken that keeps on running around after its head’s been cut off.

“Ladybug is missing,” I told them.

This didn’t create the stir I’d been expecting. Rena Rouge even smiled.

“Well, isn’t she always missing until we need her? No-one knows where she goes in between the emergencies, do they?”

“Missing in action,” I corrected myself. “Possibly captured. By Hawkmoth.”

I went on, trying to get the worst over and done with—although there was so much ‘worst’, I didn’t see how we’d ever be done with it. “And a girl who was trying to help her,” I said. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”

There was the stir I’d been expecting earlier—a prickle of unease, not even loud enough to be a mutter. It was like a soft, collective drawing of breath. I wondered if any of them knew. No, they couldn’t know. But if Ladybug had chosen them, perhaps they were people she knew in real life. I tried my hardest to ignore that thought. I didn’t want to recognize them. I didn’t want to stumble across something that might make this whole, hellish situation worse.

“Ladybug will protect her,” said Rena.

I forced myself to go on talking. Saying these things was like grinding my teeth against granite, but there was nothing else to be done.

“She might be—they might _both_ be—very injured. Marinette had a broken leg when I left her.”

“You _left_ her?” said Carapace.

I took half a step forwards, forgetting my determined calm, but Chloe was saying something. Chloe saved me in a weird way, because she took all of my anger and disgust, and re-focused it on someone else.

“Ugh,” she said, examining her nails. “Marinette was probably just faking a broken leg to get attention.”

I tried to run this remark through my Chloe-filter--I tried to imagine that she was really concerned, deep down, and it was just coming out as thoughtlessness--but I didn’t have the energy.

“Go home,” I said. “I don’t need you.”

The dismay that shot across her face might have made me laugh, in happier times.

“What? Yes, you do.” She got a hold of herself, and went on, in a sniffy voice, “Everyone knows that Ladybug is the brains of your operation. If you’re trying to come up with a plan on your own, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

“I already have a plan,” I said. “There’s no place in it for a superhero who doesn’t want to rescue the akuma-victim.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to rescue her,” Chloe retorted.

“What _are_ you saying? It’s not clear.”

She made a sound of deep disgust. “Ladybug would understand me.”

I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t have the energy for that either. It all made sense to me now, in that toppling-dominoes kind of way--why Ladybug had always seemed less-than-thrilled with Chloe’s adulation, why it had been such a struggle to listen to her, trust her, give her any credit.

But she had done it anyway. She had promoted her childhood tormentor for no other reason than because she showed promise, and she hadn’t said a word about it. Not to me, anyway. There was a whole story I hadn’t seen, full of tiny-but-heroic sacrifices that nobody had given her credit for.

I hated it. I’m normally a pretty laid-back guy. I’m normally happy to let other people keep their own secrets. But this--when I could have been helping her, making it bearable, _making her happy_ \--this pissed me off like nothing has before or since.

“Fine,” I said, turning my back abruptly so that Chloe couldn’t see my face. “If you can take orders and contain your resentment for Marinette, you can tag along. But I know where you live, Chloe Bourgeois, and if you let us down, I’m going to shred every item in your wardrobe with my claws, starting with that Gucci cardigan you love so much.”

Behind me, I heard Chloe gasp at the enormity of this threat. “You’re worse than Hawkmoth,” she said.

For no reason I could fathom, Master Fu’s words suddenly flashed through my head: ‘Your emotional signatures are almost indistinguishable now.’

Had I become just like Hawkmoth? I couldn’t seem to see the good side of Chloe anymore, but that felt like abandoning my stupidity rather than abandoning my principles. I wouldn’t--I knew I wouldn’t--sacrifice other people to get Ladybug back.

But I _had_ to get her back.

“So what do we do now?” said Rena.

I took a deep breath and shut my eyes. More grinding out granite. I thought to myself, half-hysterically, that it would be a relief when the action finally came. But I had no idea.

“Hawkmoth will akumatize Marinette or Ladybug,” I said, “and use them against us.” 

“But…” Rena said this very slowly, as if she was dreading my response. “You said they were injured…”

I shut my eyes again. “He can still manipulate them. He just needs them to be alive. He doesn’t even need them to be conscious.”

“That’s sick!”

“Yes,” I said, in a hollow voice. I wanted to tell her that it was always sick, every time—turning people into supervillainous allegories of their own worst feelings, getting inside their heads and bribing them, twitching their nerves like puppet strings. It had never _not_ been sick. It had just never been someone I loved so much before. 

“We have Ladybug’s Miraculous,” I went on, “but her Kwami was injured when she was. She’s not well enough to transform. That means we can’t capture the akuma to free Marinette. Or Ladybug.”

“So what then?” said Carapace. “How are we going to stop them?”

“We need time. Ladybug’s Kwami might be ready to transform in a few hours—maybe a few days. We need to keep the akuma-victim busy and minimize civilian casualties.”

“For a few _days_?” said Rena.

I forced a smile. Cat Noir’s sunshine smile. “Trust me, it won’t really be days. I just have to tell you the worst-case scenarios, so that we’re all prepared. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to pace ourselves. Try not to use your power if you can avoid it. If you _can’t_ avoid it, find someone else to cover for you while your Kwami recharges, and get back to work as soon as possible.”

Rena held up a hand for silence--and suddenly, that was all there was. A thousand little background sounds that I hadn’t even noticed while they’d been going on were suddenly absent. There was no birdsong, no traffic, no distant laughter. I looked out over the edge of the building and, where there should have been a busy city street, there was just cloud. It was as though our rooftop had risen to a height of several thousand feet without any of us noticing.

“This is it, right?” said Rena. “This has to be him. Or--” her mouth twisted, as though she was in pain “-- _her_?”

“I’ll go down and check,” said Chloe, but I caught her shoulder, looking at the carpet of cloud beneath us. It was dark, and tendrils of it were snaking upwards like smoke. I thought of the solid mass of dark-winged butterflies I had seen on my first day as Cat Noir--and how brazenly Ladybug had leapt right into them.

“It will be like the akumas,” I said. “You have to stay positive, don’t give in to negative thoughts. Always remember that there’s a way out.”

If Plagg had been there, he would have told me to heed my own advice. As it was, I felt that curious shiver pass across my skin, as though he was squirming.

“Leave the akuma-victim to me,” I said. “If it’s Ladybug, I know her best. And if it’s Marinette--well, maybe she’ll talk to me. I’ve saved her life eight times by now.”

Rena made a small, sceptical noise in the back of her throat. I noticed that she was fidgeting, twisting her fingers anxiously, but I looked away and tried to think about something else, because I’d had enough sudden realizations to last me a lifetime.

“You guys take care of the civilians,” I said. “The akuma-victim will have done something to them, I don’t know what. They’ll probably try to attack you. Or each other.”

“And all this is just playing for time?” Rena demanded. “Until Ladybug’s kwami recovers? There’s no way we can--”

“Rena, you’re in charge if I die,” I said, giving her my sunshine smile. “Until I die, do as I say.” 


	7. Marionette

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yay, finally got down to the action! Marinette has been akumatized into the spirit of despair, and Cat Noir has to fight her, even though it's his own despair he's facing.

Diving into the fog was a shock. It was ice-cold--it blocked out most of the light--it made every building and tall tree look stunted, because their tops couldn’t be seen from the ground. It enclosed the street-lamps, though, which had flickered on in the gloom. Each one had a kind of halo around its head, where the light got caught in the drops of moisture.

Still, our view of the Pont Neuf was clear. The fog was thin there, probably because Hawkmoth wanted me to be able to see my own doom.

I took a deep breath. The cold had been in my skin before, but now it struck into my bones. “Oh god,” I whispered.

It was so still, that was the creepiest thing about it. I had never seen so many people standing so still before. They were spaced out evenly along the embankments on either side of the river. And more people--more than I could count--were ranged along the Pont Neuf. They had climbed onto railings and parapets and were standing there, poised, perfectly still, waiting for someone to give them the signal to jump.

Marinette was floating just above the crowd at the centre of the bridge, and she was the only thing that was moving--or at least, her costume was.

It was a spectacular dress. My father would have been proud of it. It was made of scraps and tatters of grey silk, swirling about in the breeze like tentacles. Or _was_ it the breeze? Sometimes they reached out to caress the cheek of one of the blank-eyed citizens ranged along the bridge--and afterwards, the man or woman would turn back to look out over the water with a kind of dark longing, as if their urge to jump had just intensified.

Her lips were candyfloss pink and, just like the real Marinette, she didn’t shout. She didn’t need to, though. The silence was so profound that we could have heard her from the other side of the city.

She said, “My name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng. And I am The End.”

I looked for signs of my soft-hearted friend--or even for signs of Ladybug--but the only vulnerabilities I could see made my heart sink even further. Both of her legs were dangling helplessly. Her arms were bare, and covered in scratches, but there were no goose-bumps--no indication that her body was fighting the cold, or trying to keep itself alive.

I wondered how long he could dangle her about like this before she died. I wondered if I would suddenly see her head lolling on her shoulders--and if Hawkmoth would force her floppy limbs to fight me even when she was out cold.

The fog thickened, as if in response to that thought, but I could still see the motion of the watching, waiting crowd. They weren’t waiting anymore.

It was like a Mexican wave--or, I guess, a Mexican drop. The ones nearest us jumped first, as if she wanted to give us a chance of catching them. As if she was teasing us.

I used my stick to push off from the ground and leapt to catch the first of them. The drop wasn’t that steep, the water wasn’t that cold, but I didn’t know if I could trust them to swim. They were so blank-eyed and floppy.

I leapt from one to another as they dived, taking their weight in a way that knocked the breath out of me, lowering them to the ground as slowly as I dared, so that my arms were free for the next one.

I didn’t look back. There was no time to shepherd them somewhere safe once I’d caught them. I just had to hope that they wouldn’t get up, dust themselves off, and try to hurl themselves into the Seine again.

The river was churning now, as if it was impatient to be embracing them. Beside me through the fog, I could see the others moving. Rena wasn’t as strong, and Chloe was carving a path straight towards Marinette, but Carapace was keeping up with me, catching the leapers on the other side.

“Rena,” I shouted, as I used my stick to vault towards the next one, “look after the people we’ve already caught--get them up above the fog.”

Her voice crackled in my ear. “Uh… onto all these high buildings they could jump from?”

“It’s rising anyway,” said Carapace. “It’s like smoke, but without the warmth.”

“We have to get under it, then,” I said. “Take them to the catacombs. Find a way to warm them up. Tell them they have to think positive thoughts.”

Rena’s breath caught in her throat as she took the weight of a two-hundred-pound policeman. “Don’t you dare turn me into the nurse just because I’m a woman! Queen Bee’s not doing anything!”

I gritted my teeth. Each jumper was getting heavier as the cold sapped my strength--and I swore they were _waiting_ for me. They could have all jumped at once and we’d never have been able to catch them. But, for some reason, Marinette wanted us to feel like we were doing well.

“You’re in charge when I die, remember?” I said, stretching painfully to catch an old lady who’d gone wide.

“Anyway, I _am_ doing something.” Chloe’s voice was a smug crackle in our earpieces. “I am going straight to the source of the problem.”

“Chloe, I told you--” But I had to break off to catch the next one--or rather, the next two. Twins, leaping at different heights to try and confuse me. By the time I was free to berate Chloe again, she was bearing down on Marinette, weaving between the scraps of silk billowing this way and that in the breeze.

She was never exactly subtle, but Marinette didn’t appear to see her. She was looking down, clasping her hands in a way that Chloe obviously found infuriating.

She was going to use her stinger. I cried out, not exactly sure who I was frightened for, but Marinette turned so fast that the cry died in my throat.

She used her silk tentacles like hands. One of them snaked around Chloe’s ankle and yanked her off course, so that her stinger paralyzed one of the silent citizens on the bridge. He stayed stony and still, but the other people came alive. The tentacle round Chloe’s ankle was pulling her into their outstretched arms. She was kicking out at them with the other leg, shrieking as they pulled her hair, shuddering at the touch of poor people. They bundled her down onto the bridge and pinned her hands to her sides while the silken tentacles wound around her, binding her up in a kind of cocoon.

Carapace and I started forwards to help her, but the people nearest to us started to cascade into the water, as if they knew it was their job to provide a distraction. Or as if Marinette was in their heads too.

All this time, she hadn’t moved. Her legs were dangling uselessly--I could see bare, soot-stained feet peeping out beneath the hem of her dress--but she was using the crowd as her hands and feet, the way she used everything in a fight to her advantage.

That was when I knew it had been a mistake to think of her as a puppet. She was Ladybug--with all of Ladybug’s wits and all of Ladybug’s resources. She was probably even deadlier as a bad guy, because now she had fewer scruples holding her back. ‘It’s what I’d do if I wasn’t so nice’, she had said.

When Chloe had been bound up from head to foot, the tentacles lifted her to Marinette’s eye-level.

“Always,” she said, “always a good idea to hang back until you figure out precisely what they can do. Especially if you’re going to leave yourself as exposed as you just did.”

She spoke so sweetly that I could see Chloe’s eyes narrow with fury. That was actually pretty admirable, though I couldn’t really appreciate it at the time. She was being squeezed like a boa constrictor’s dinner, but her resentment was still stronger than her fear.

“Another tip,” said Marinette, “if you want it. Malice is predictable. Your grudges make your actions really easy to anticipate. I’d have known you were coming even if you hadn’t been buzzing and seething on the way up. Just something to think about. Might come in handy the next time you get akumatized.”

Another tentacle reared up and whipped the comb out of Chloe’s hair. And then they all released their hold at once, jerking her and spinning her away. She was still transforming as she plunged into the water.

I dropped my latest catch onto the bank and leapt after her. The light of her transformation was leaving a trail through the dark water. Could Carapace handle the others? But there were no splashes beside me as I dived. The people on my side of the embankment had stopped jumping. And I wondered, as I groped after Chloe’s sinking form, whether that was Marinette teasing us or trying to help us. 

When I hauled Chloe out of the river, they were still standing poised on the embankments, waiting for me. Carapace was hanging back too. I had to assume that he was remembering my orders to leave the akuma-victim to me.

Beside me, Chloe was spluttering and shivering and bewailing the state of her Gucci cardigan, but I knew her tantrums were seldom about what she pretended they were about.

“I’ll get your miraculous back,” I said.

She broke off and looked up at me, wary and hopeful. This was why Marinette had promoted her, protected her, even occasionally forgiven her. She could be so child-like at times.

“Listen, Chloe, I need you to go down to the catacombs and help Rena. Wait for me there--I’ll have your miraculous. And then I’ll be expecting you to follow my orders. Deal?”

She clenched her jaw, as though she was working hard to suppress her first response. But she nodded.

I turned and looked up at Marinette, who was still hovering a few feet above the bridge, watching us with mild-mannered curiosity.

She was making no move to attack us. None of her zombified minions were trying to leap off the bridge. I decided to interpret that as an invitation to get closer.

I used my stick to propel me up to the parapet and waited, looking for some kind of clue in her eyes. Was it unfair of me to be expecting her to fight the akuma? She must have been so tired, so injured. And, after all, I was expecting her to fight my own despair, which _I_ wasn’t doing a great job of fighting at the moment. But still. She was Ladybug. She always thought of a way out.

I let her wind her silken tentacles around me. She seemed more curious than anything else. It made me think of a blind person trying to feel my face to work out who I was.

Carapace cried out, but I turned very slightly and shook my head. It was probably a trap, but if she was trying to fight the akuma, I had to give her a chance. I wasn’t going to throw the first punch. But I kept my stick folded in against my chest, because I wasn’t stupid.

“Cat Noir…” she said uncertainly.

That lit a flare of hope inside me--she could probably see me light up from the inside. She wasn’t calling me ‘Kitty’. That meant some part of her was still trying to conceal her identity. Only Ladybug called me ‘Kitty’.

I took a deep breath--as deep as the silk wrappings round my chest would allow.

“Marinette, this isn’t you. You’re not like this.”

“Oh no,” she said. Her eyes were wide and doe-like, her candyfloss lips curving into a smile. “Of course it isn’t me. None of this trouble could come from Marinette, could it, because she’s so _sweet_ \--” The tentacles tightened around me, making my breath come out in a huff. “Marinette could never get angry, because she’s just an _angel_ \--” Another tentacle scythed through the air like a fist, knocking Carapace back as he dived to rescue me. “You don’t have to worry about what you say to Marinette, because she’s so _forgiving_.” 

Her voice softened, but not her grip. “For the record, you’re right," she said. "Marinette’s gone.” Another tentacle brushed my cheek, almost tenderly, as if she didn’t know the other one was bruising my ribs. “It’s not her. But it _was_. And it was awful.”

I extended my stick, eyes bulging now, to try and break the vice-like grip she had me in. It snagged the side of the bridge and propelled me backwards so fast that the scraps of silk fell away. Or maybe she let me go. She’d made her point, after all.

But now I was back where I’d started, and she had lined up more civilians along the embankment, ready to jump.

She spread out her hands, and those silken grey tentacles reared up in the breeze.

“Are you ready to go faster?” she said, in her sweetest, school-girl voice.

I shook my head, but she wasn’t paying attention. The couple nearest to me--they were still clutching each other as they leapt--threw themselves into the Seine.

And for a moment, I stared at the ripples spreading out from the splash and couldn’t bring myself to do anything. Plagg squirmed against my skin, but I couldn’t make myself move. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was too late to do anything--particularly about Marinette. 

I don’t know what shook me out of it. Maybe it was Carapace’s shout, or the fact that Ladybug’s eyes were still on me, and I couldn’t let her see me fail.

The whole time, while I plunged into the water, following the trail of bubbles, and dragged the protesting victims up to the surface, I was trying to reason with the voice in my head that told me it was too late. But I couldn’t think of anything. I told myself she wasn’t gone, but it was just meaningless words--just a kind of chant in some long-forgotten language that nobody spoke anymore. I couldn’t make it _mean_ anything.

All I could do was grit my teeth and try to get through it, hoping that at some point I’d come out the other side. After all, when you’re _inside_ the cloud, what good is the silver lining? It’s just another wall to hem you in.

I kept going. I hauled my sodden couple onto the bank and leapt up to catch the next ones, and the next. Each new catch twanged the tendons in my neck and shoulders--and sometimes they got past me and I had to dive in after them, dragging them back to the shore while they struggled and complained. But she was watching, so I didn’t disappoint. She had pinned Chloe’s miraculous in her hair. It glowed golden through the fog, like a beacon.

By the time I worked my way back to the bridge, panting and aching and wet from the river, I was almost smiling. So was she.

“Getting bored yet, princess?” I said, trying to recapture my swagger.

She shook her head. “I could watch you all day.”

“Well, I’m usually pretty good value for money."

I climbed up over the parapet and onto the bridge, glancing over my shoulder as the civilians backed away and then re-grouped to form a circle around me. I was certain by now that she was herding them with her mind, positioning them so that they were best-placed to attack me. Hawkmoth had really played to her strengths. If there was one thing Ladybug was good at, it was organizing people.

Of course, there were lots of things. That was the problem.

“I don’t want to tell you your job,” I said, with all the cheerfulness I could muster, “but the akuma-victims usually issue a few demands before tearing up the city.”

Marinette shrugged. “You know what they are by now. He wants your miraculous. Yours and Ladybug’s.”

Again, her phrasing made me wonder if there was some part of Marinette’s mind still in control. She hadn’t said ‘Yours and mine’. She had said ‘Yours and Ladybug’s’.

“And if we refuse?” I said, just as carefully.

“Well, more of this.” She gestured downriver, to the crowd of citizens that I’d left dripping on the bank. “But for real. I don’t have to line them up in front of you and make them jump slowly, one at a time.”

“It wasn’t that slow,” I muttered.

“I can make them die quietly in their own houses. You’d never know there was anything wrong until they were long past saving.”

“And what’s in all of this for you?” I said.

She hesitated, as if she hadn’t quite understood the question. “Do you mean me, Marinette? Or me, The End?”

I blinked. “Whichever one of you I’m currently talking to.”

“I told you, Marinette’s gone.”

“I don’t believe you.” 

She came down to my level--not quite to the ground, because I was taller than her, and presumably her legs wouldn’t support her anyway--but we were face-to-face now.

“You _do_ believe it,” she whispered. She was very close. Her hands were hovering half an inch from my chest.

It suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at Ladybug without the mask--which I’d been dreaming about doing for the best part of a year. And the knowledge that I had _really_ been doing it for the best part of a year didn’t make this moment any less significant. I was suddenly aware of how pretty she was, and how the grey dress was clinging to her. I think I would always have known she was pretty if she had looked at me directly like this, instead of mumbling at the floor.

“I can feel it dragging at you,” she said. “Every step is a struggle, because you know you’ve already lost.”

I shook my head. “Not while you’re alive.”

She gave me a smile, as if I was too dumb to be argued with. “If you want to know what’s in it for me, you have to understand that I’m not Marinette. What he told Marinette was that he could make the outside match the inside. He said he could make sure everyone else knew what it was like to feel the hopelessness she carried around with her every day. But he was talking to me by then, and I’m not interested in equity or social justice. Despair isn’t really an emotion, it’s a disease. And all a disease wants is to spread.”

I stared at her. She was saying all this quite calmly--with none of the ranting and desperate self-justification of the usual villains. In fact, she was talking to me like Ladybug, who could be quite good with the quips and defiant speeches, but mostly just hung back and watched and reasoned. It was crazy how much she sounded like Ladybug--it raised goose-bumps all along my arms--but every word she said was contrary to what Ladybug stood for.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? We had turned her into a symbol--someone who ‘stood for’ something--and forgotten she was a person. Nobody was better-equipped to know that than me--I had seen her make mistakes, I had seen her fall flat on her face in the middle of a mission. I had just been over-awed by how quickly she got up again.

It was weird. She was telling me she was the personification of despair, and it wasn’t that I particularly disbelieved her--I’d just never really thought of her as a human being before she started declaring that she wasn’t.

Marinette shut her eyes, and got that abstracted look I recognized from the other akuma-victims. It meant Hawkmoth was shouting in her head.

“He telling you to stop talking and get on with it?” I said.

She shrugged again, though it was a bit shaky. “He says to tell you that he’ll kill me if you don’t hand over the miraculouses. He says I’m dying already--and the longer this goes on for, the less chance there is that I’ll recover.”

“Do you believe him?” I said, trying not to let the panic show on my face.

Marinette tilted her head again, as if she was trying to shake him out of her mind.

“I believe he won’t stop at murder,” she said, in that same cool, matter-of-fact tone. “But I also believe he couldn’t get me to stop if he ordered me to.” She winced--clearly he was yelling in her head--but it didn’t keep her from looking straight at me. Her mild-mannered smile had disappeared. “ _You’re_ probably the only one who can stop me now.”

“I intend to, princess,” I said. Then I lurched forwards, plucked the comb out of her hair, and waited for the consequences.


	8. Lucky Charm

The civilians closed in around me--the silken tentacles swooped down like birds of prey. And, for a moment, it was wonderful. It was like dancing with her up on the rooftops. It was like the time when Rogercop took over the city and I had to beat up the entire police-force by myself. There was no time to be afraid, there was no room to despair. I leapt from one assailant to the other, blocking punches, ducking under tentacles, carving a circle of space for myself in the press of bodies.

I could see Marinette’s eyes flicking to left and right--she was co-ordinating every fist--but I was meeting everything she threw at me, and even as she frowned in concentration, I could see her smiling, I could hear her breath quickening. She was enjoying herself too.

After a while, it dawned on me that the day was brighter. The fog was thinning overhead, letting the sunlight through. And when the silken tentacles caught me, or ruffled through my hair, they hardly stung at all.

Marinette pulled back, panting, and I felt the civilians around me take a step backwards too.

I staggered, but tried to turn it into a swagger. “Running out of fuel, princess?” I said.

She turned her head, as if seeking inspiration, and it was then that I noticed a trickle of blood snaking down from her hair-line to her jaw.

It whipped my smile away in an instant--it practically slammed into my stomach. It reminded me that she was falling apart, under the tricks and clever costumes, while I was out here enjoying myself.

When Marinette looked back at me, she caught my expression, and put two and two together as only Marinette can. She reached up to touch the line of blood that was now making its way down her neck. She looked at her fingertips. And then a slow, horrible smile spread across her face.

“I know where I can get more fuel,” she said.

She held out her hand, and one of the tentacles passed her something. It sparkled dully--there was no sunlight to catch it anymore--but I knew that it was glass, and I knew she was squeezing it tightly. There was another trail of blood snaking down her arm.

I reached up and grabbed her, shouting incoherently. She was trying to press the tip of the shard to her neck--as if she hadn’t made her fucking point already--but I wrenched it back. I was struggling so frantically that I knocked her over backwards and landed on top of her, kicking out at the tentacles as they tried to pull me away.

I don’t know what I was shouting. Whatever it was, it only broadened her smile. I held her arm at the elbow--I couldn’t grab her hand in case it pressed the glass even deeper into her skin--but there was so much blood, and I was so scared. The fog had thickened to choking consistency, one of the tentacles was wrapped around my neck, and I didn’t know how much longer I could hold on for. I didn’t want to pass out and leave her with that shard of glass still in her hand.

I reached up with my claws and called for the Cataclysm. The glass-shard turned to dust in her hand, showering her face, and for a moment, it killed her struggles. The tentacle released me and I collapsed, coughing, on top of her.

For the longest time, everything was still. It occurred to me, through the haze, that I should be taking advantage of this moment to search for the akuma--or at least get away before I transformed and revealed my secret identity to the whole of Paris. And then it occurred to me that maybe I was lying on her broken leg and making her injuries even worse. I couldn’t do anything about it. I was done. If I could have thought of a way to die without killing her, I would have done it.

And then, out of the blackness--right by my ear--a tiny, breathy voice.

I knew it. Ladybug’s voice when she was at the end of her strength and just about to collapse. Marinette’s voice when she was trying to talk to me in the classroom. It said, “Lucky charm.”

I raised my head, just a fraction, to look at her. Her eyes were closed, her forehead creased, as if she was in the middle of some deep, internal struggle--or maybe she was trying to keep Hawkmoth from using her eyes, just for a second.

“Lucky charm,” she repeated, in the same strained, tiny voice.

I didn’t know what she meant. Was she asking for Tikki? Could I try to reassure her without giving Hawkmoth my entire plan? I wanted to say something, just to let her know that I was still there--that somebody had heard her--but the silken tentacles were working their way around me again, the creases on Marinette’s forehead were smoothing out.

The tentacles picked me up, whirled me round, and pitched me into the river.

I wondered if that was her too--if she was trying to fling me as far away as possible before I transformed--if she was still trying to protect our identities.

***

I called for Carapace to take my place and hurried into a side-road, ducking down behind a car a split-second before I transformed. There was nobody on the streets--the fog was too thick for them to have seen me anyway--but these habits of concealment are ingrained in me.

I dug into my pockets and wordlessly handed Plagg a wedge of cheese. Then I sat down on the curb and stared at the scratched paint on the car beside me. I was so tired by then, and I couldn’t see an end to it. No, that wasn’t true. I could see an end, just not one I liked.

It had been hard for her to give me that hint. Her voice had been barely audible, as if it’d had to make its way through miles of dark tunnels to reach me. And I couldn’t even figure out what she meant. What if that had been her last chance, and I’d just squandered it?

“You could feel it, couldn’t you?” said Plagg, landing on my shoulder and chewing his camembert right in my ear. “The way the fog thinned out when you were happy?”

“Yep.”

I stared at the scratched paintwork, letting my eyes blur in and out of focus. My body was numb with the cold, but my mind kept going over the same ground. It was like crawling through barbed wire, but I couldn’t stop.

“So, if you could think of something happy that’s not connected to Ladybug or Marinette? Or your mother.”

I just looked at him. I didn’t even have the energy to wince at the reference to my mother.

Plagg went on, his voice getting higher as his desperation increased. “Nino, maybe?”

“Nino leads to Alya,” I said woodenly, “and Alya leads to Marinette.”

“Jagged Stone?”

“She was with me when I saw my first concert. She designed his latest album cover.”

“Chloe, then?”

“Are you serious?”

He rubbed a paw across his forehead, trying to contain his impatience. I should have felt honoured, because he didn’t often try to contain his impatience with me.

“Just--anything happy,” he muttered. “Something to stick around for. A book you’re looking forward to reading--a vacation--your favourite movie--”

“Solitude,” I said. “Starring Emilie Agreste.”

Plagg gave up, and settled heavily on my shoulder. “Oh, you’re the worst.”

“I’m not arguing with you.”

“You’re determined not to fight this!”

“There _is_ no fighting this.”

“That’s not what you told _her_ ,” Plagg protested. He got up suddenly, and pressed a paw against my cheek. “Is that it? Are you relying on her to fight it for you?”

I hesitated, wondering why it stung me to hear him say that. I hadn’t thought anything had the power to sting me anymore.

“She can fight anything,” I said, trying to pass off my cowardice as loyalty.

“They’re not _her_ feelings to fight!”

“There’s no other way, Plagg.”

“Uh-huh,” said Plagg gloomily. “And what did you think was going on when you heard _her_ say that?”

I winced. I couldn’t help it. He had just pushed me back into that horrible moment in the cellar of the abandoned warehouse, when Ladybug had been so injured but so composed, telling me she had thought it all through and there was no other way. It had sounded too cold, too rehearsed. I had known right away that there was something else going on. The asshole she was in love with was ruining my life yet again. I hadn’t known it was _me_.

Despair had already been in control of her then. Maybe it had nothing to do with Hawkmoth, or the akumas. 

“I don’t think I can run away from it,” I said slowly. “Thinking about something happy that isn’t connected with her would feel like a lie.” I had had it up to here with lies, even the ones to spare my feelings. In fact, I would spent the next couple of weeks trying to excavate them--all the white lies, all the times she had skipped over the truth to spare my feelings. I would become obsessed with them--just like I was shortly to become obsessed with finding Hawkmoth. But that’s another story.

“I think I know a way to find some happiness connected with her, though,” I went on. “It involves relying on her _and_ fighting the fog myself.”

Plagg squinted at me, tentatively hopeful. “Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But then, you never do, to me.”

***

The catacombs were a sight for sore eyes--and mine were definitely sore. Bedraggled people with blankets wrapped around their shoulders were talking earnestly in little groups. Alya was handing out paper cups of hot chocolate. Juleika’s mother had even found a guitar, and was leading a spirited sing-song.

Alya hurried up to me as soon as she saw me, but I held up a hand to forestall her questions.

“Where’s Rena Rouge?”

“Uh, transforming, I think,” said Alya. “Off in one of the side-tunnels.”

“She used her power?”

“That’s how she got everyone down here.” Alya straightened her glasses, grinning. “It was pretty ingenious, actually. She saw that the people were jumping too fast for you and Carapace to catch them, so she used her illusion power to make it look like the entrance to the catacombs was the edge of the Seine. Everyone jumped down there of their own accord. And then, once they were out of the fog, she could reason with them.”

“She’s incredible,” I said.

Alya giggled, a little nervously, but said nothing.

“Was the hot chocolate your idea?” I asked.

“Well, the guy with the stall got swept down here, and he wanted to help. And I thought of the Harry Potter books, you know? Where chocolate is the only thing that helps against the Dementors?” She stopped, as if taking in my appearance for the first time. “Do you want one?” she said, holding out her cup to me.

I opened my mouth to tell her that I didn’t have time, and then closed it again.

“Does it work?”

“Sure. You superheroes eat regular food, right? Take it.”

I took it. I had to admit, I needed all the help I could get.

“Cat Noir?” said Alya. She was twisting her fingers, now that they’d been relieved of their paper cup. “I think I know where the akuma is. She’s my friend--Marinette, I mean--I don’t know if you remember? Anyway, she’s got this good luck charm that her friend Adrien gave her. Takes it everywhere with her. And I’m pretty sure it’s in that because, the last time I talked to her, she was kind of upset about him. I can’t tell you any more than that--”

But I held up a hand to hush her. I didn’t want any more information--I had more than I could handle already. Most of it was painful, but there were three words that lit a fire in my chest.

“Good luck charm?”

“Yeah, it’s like--I don’t know, a couple of beads on a string? She usually keeps it in her purse.”

She _had_ been trying to tell me, then. She’d been trying to tell me where the akuma was.

It was horribly wonderful to hear that she took my lucky charm wherever she went, and wonderfully horrible to have it confirmed that I had upset her the last time we’d talked, but at least now I had something to work with--if not hope, then at least _help_.

“Thank you,” I said, taking a shaky sip of the hot chocolate. It really did work.


	9. Tiny Sidebar - I Love You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Woohoo, climax of the 'The End' stuff (though there's lots of fall-out still to come). Marinette is still akumatized, Adrien is still battling his fear of losing her, and Cat Noir is being awesome, as always!

I lingered there, taking sips of hot chocolate, listening to Juleika’s mother strumming her guitar. People really were amazing. Ten minutes ago, they’d been about to hurl themselves into the river--some of them had even managed it, and were still wet and shivering from the experience--but they were doing their best to be cheerful now, trying to keep each other’s spirits up.

It looked as though some kind of spontaneous group therapy was going on under the city. People were gathered together in huddles, talking, nodding sympathetically, placing their hands on each other’s shoulders.

“It’s not like the other akuma-victims,” Alya was saying, while I stared. “I mean, it’s got to be traumatic anyway, getting turned into a zombie or a mummy by some new supervillain, but they never used the stuff inside your head before. Everyone here had their own reasons for jumping. The--” she made a face, “-- _the End_ just brought it to the surface, and made it impossible to resist. A lot of bad stuff’s been stirred up.”

“No kidding,” I said. My hot chocolate had run out, and the cold was starting to creep back.

“It’s ironic, really. You have no idea what a positive person she is, usually…”

“It’s not her,” I said, mainly to get her to stop talking. But it was true. Alya had no idea the extent to which it wasn’t her.

I scanned the crowds again, trying to warm myself with the thought of other people’s kindness, and saw something that made my heart jolt.

Master Fu was here. There was no mistaking that bright shirt, or the way he bent over his stick to make himself seem small and inoffensive, while watching your every move like a hawk.

At the moment, though, the stick was clamped under his elbow. He was nursing something in his hands, like a little baby bird, and I took two eager steps towards him before I remembered myself.

I wasn’t allowed to approach him as Cat Noir. It was too risky. Hawkmoth was always looking for the Keeper, and anyone who spoke to Ladybug or Cat Noir out in the open would be suspect.

I turned back to Alya, and held out the Queen Bee comb. “Can I trust you to pass this on to Chloe Bourgeois?”

Alya didn’t dignify this with a response. She closed her hand over the comb and said tartly, “Can you trust _her_ to give it back?”

“Well, that’s a problem for later,” I said, smiling Cat Noir’s sunny smile. Maybe there was some real sunshine behind it this time. It had to be Tikki he was holding. I didn’t like that he was nursing her so gently--as if she was still frail--but it was some comfort that he had thought it safe enough to bring her along.

And she could tell me if Marinette was in any pain--although, if I wanted to fight the fog, it might be best not to know that.

I was shifting from foot to foot with impatience, but I still managed to say to Alya, “Could you tell Rena Rouge I need her? She’s part of the plan. She’s practically the whole of it.”

I found an empty tunnel and transformed back into Adrien, while Plagg grumbled.

“I’m not a fashion accessory, you know. You can’t just try me on and then take me off on a whim. Transforming is hard!”

“Really?” I said. “You’ve never mentioned that.”

Plagg retreated into my shirt pocket, muttering something about getting some rest while he still could.

I turned back along the empty tunnel, but it wasn’t empty anymore. Tendrils of fog were moving over the water like snakes, driving the cold in waves before them, honing in on me as if they could _see_.

My breath caught in the back of my throat. They were already too close to run away from. They were like groping fingers, and one of them curled next to my cheek, imparting a little sliver of cold.

But they had caught me without my costume. I wasn’t Cat Noir. Could she _see_ with the fog? She must have been able to see with the eyes of those zombified civilians up on the bridge, because she had moved them exactly where she needed them to be. Did she know who I was now, because the fog had found me?

“She’s looking for you,” Plagg said, through the thin layer of cotton. He sounded pretty unimpressed. Or maybe he was just unimpressed at having been disturbed again so soon.

“Can she track me anywhere with the fog?” I asked breathlessly.

“I guess so. Since you’re the power-source behind the fog, I guess it would be pretty weird if she _couldn’t_ sense you. But don’t worry. It doesn’t have eyes. And if you move fast and think of something relatively cheerful, I bet we could lose it.”

“No need,” I said, half-smiling. I was actually having to work pretty hard to keep my positive emotions under wraps in that moment. This was an advantage I hadn’t expected. “It’s ideal. Think we can find our way through the catacombs to the warehouse district?”

I felt him stretching inside my pocket, and then his head grudgingly emerged.

“Cat Noir has a map of the city in his stick. But you can’t just keep transforming like this without offering me cheese.” 

***

I tried to pick a route through the crowd where I wouldn’t be waylaid by any school friends or kindly souls pushing hot chocolate on me. I didn’t want to bring the despair back to these people, but I couldn’t run the risk of losing it either. That meant picking my way carefully through the tunnels, from one deserted walkway to the next, biting down on my impatience to see Master Fu.

It took about twenty minutes to reach him. And by the time I did, he was watching my bright eyes and clenched fists as if they didn’t bode well.

“Is she OK?” I said, in a tense whisper, when I was close enough not to be overheard.

“Tikki? Yes. Do you know you are radiating despair like a lighthouse?”

“Have to,” I said, giving him a fleeting smile. “Can you hand her over please? And the earrings? I’d better not be seen talking to you for too long.”

His hand twitched when he passed her to me, as if he was having second thoughts and then over-ruling them. But there were no doubts on Tikki’s face. She looked at me with her wide, doe-like eyes and said, “Let’s go, Adrien.”

Her confidence warmed me so much that I could feel the fingers of the fog drawing back, as if I’d burned them. I had to summon up all the worst images of the past few hours--the line of blood snaking down Marinette’s neck, the young couple clinging to each other as they leapt into the Seine--to draw them back.

“Who are you going to use as Ladybug?” said Master Fu.

He was watching me carefully, but he didn’t seem as apprehensive as before. Maybe he’d been reassured by Tikki’s confidence. Or maybe he had seen the love in my eyes when he’d handed her to me. She reminded me so much of Marinette--the real Marinette, not the one at the centre of the fog. And all my hopes of restoring that Marinette were tied up with Tikki. I couldn’t help loving her.

“Nobody,” I said. “If Hawkmoth sees someone else using Ladybug’s Miraculous, he’ll know it was Marinette.”

“You are still trying to preserve her identity?” 

“It’s what she’d want me to do.” I straightened up, trying to radiate the wide-eyed certainty that Adrien had always seemed to find so easy. “Trust me.”

“Or rather, trust her?”

“Exactly.”

***

There were not many pockets in the Cat Noir outfit, but I found one for Tikki to nestle in. Then I located Rena, persuaded her not to scream at the sight of the fog creeping up behind me, and led her through the tunnels, following the map in my stick.

For the first half-hour, she asked me questions, and I had to deflect them as cheerfully as I could, without letting the despair slip from my thoughts. But after that, she was silent. From time to time, I would see her glancing over her shoulder at the fog and shuddering. Cheerful as she usually was, it had to be getting to her by now.

We kept in contact with Carapace and Queen Bee through our ear-pieces. They followed Marinette at a distance and gave me a report of her movements. I cross-checked them against our position on the map until I was convinced she was following us.

“It’s creepy,” said Carapace. “The whole city’s flocking around her like some kind of zombie army. If your plan was to draw her into the less populated areas, it’s not going to work. She’s bringing the population with her.”

“Good,” I said, glancing at Rena. “I want everyone to see this.”

I went slowly, for her benefit. And I kept my thoughts dark and desperate for the benefit of the fog. It wasn’t hard.

And then, after leading the fog around for so long that I could swear there was a layer of frost coating my back, the coms buzzed into life again. It was Chloe’s channel, but it was not Chloe’s voice.

“What are you doing down there?” said Marinette. The sound of her voice in my ear--as if she was leaning in close and whispering secrets--made the hair on my arms stand up.

Rena looked up in alarm, but I waved her into silence.

“Getting you your Miraculouses, princess,” I said, in the most cheerful voice I could muster. “Um… where’s Queen Bee?”

“I don’t know. I threw her in the direction of the Trocadéro.”

“With or without her Miraculous?” I asked, as if it was just a casual enquiry about the weather.

“With. She’ll be fine. She’s probably just taken a break to go shopping.”

The sulkiness in her voice almost made me smile.

“You’re going to give me what I want?” she went on.

“Always, princess.”

“You’re lying.”

I took out my earpiece, and signalled for Rena to do the same. “Come and see for yourself,” I said, and then dropped both earpieces in the water.

It was hard to do. The fog was heavy at my back. I felt as though I was dragging it along like an endless, water-logged cloak. And Marinette’s voice in my ear--even if it had been the spirit of despair choosing the words--had made me think of better things.

But I didn’t need better things. I needed the fog to keep following me.

“Was that a good idea?” said Rena. “Now we can’t contact Carapace either.”

“He’ll have to improvise,” I said, waving a casual claw. “Can he do that? You know him best.”

This was a careful understatement, and she probably heard it as such. Since Carapace threw himself in front of any projectile hurled Rena’s way, it seemed reasonable to assume either that they were lovers, or that Carapace really wanted them to be.

“Yes,” said Rena, holding her head up defiantly, even though she was blushing. “He’s got plenty of initiative. It’s just--”

“--it works best under your direction?”

Rena glared at me, but I actually managed to smile.

“I know what that’s like,” I said.

***

We had to climb up to the cellar of the warehouse where I had last left Ladybug. Great pillars and chunks of concrete were blocking the tunnels down here, and we had to find a path between them, painstakingly picking our way upwards. It was tempting to use the Cataclysm to disintegrate some of the debris, but I had to save it. I didn’t know what was coming.

Still, Rena didn’t complain. She was hard-core. Or she had a personal stake in this fight. As it turned out, it was both, but I didn’t discover that until we reached the cellar.

Marinette had got there before us. The fog that had been at our backs for hours suddenly came rushing past us, through the fissures in the rock, as if she had summoned it to her.

The cellar was much brighter now, even with the fog, because most of its ceiling had collapsed when Aftershock had toppled the place. In fact, all the higher floors had collapsed too, which made for one vast, cathedral-like structure, surrounded by a skeleton of walls. We were far below ground level, but the sunlight still filtered in from on high, through window-frames made jagged with broken glass.

If the floor had been uneven before, there were now mini-mountains of craggy cement, rearing up between the chasms and pot-holes that led back down to the catacombs. It was difficult to know where to put your feet, because the rubble was loose and sagging in places, as if it was just a thin plug over a bottomless shaft.

Of course, Marinette didn’t have to worry about that. She floated above the rubble, alone now except for those free-floating tentacles. And when she called out to us, it sounded so much like her that I almost stepped forwards automatically. I had to swerve and catch Rena to prevent her from doing the same.

But this wasn’t like quelling a momentary impulse. She fought me. She was twisting her fingers and clenching her jaw, her eyes fixed on Marinette, and I remembered too late that she had not come face-to-face with her yet. She hadn’t seen the injuries--the bare, soot-stained feet and uselessly dangling legs--or felt the sadness coming off of her in waves.

That was when I realized who Rena was. She wanted to go to Marinette so badly, and not to be a zombified minion. Just to comfort her.

“Rena,” I said gently. “Rena, stick to the plan. I need you at the end, not yet.”

I was half-holding her back and half-holding her up. She was almost sagging with impatience.

“You don’t understand,” she moaned. “She knows me--she loves me!”

“I know,” I said soothingly. “I know who you are now.”

“Then you know that she’ll listen to me!”

I didn’t know _that_ , but I didn’t say so.

“I’m sending in Adrien,” I replied. “Do you understand the plan now?”

She blinked at me, startled. But at the same time, she stopped struggling against me, and she stood up straight.

“Is it--is it safe?” she asked.

“She would never hurt him.”

Rena’s mouth twisted. “ _She_ would never hurt anybody! But it’s not her, is it?”

“Well, it is and it isn’t,” I said. “I’ve seen her fighting this. And, if there’s the tiniest trace of Marinette still in there, there’s no way she’ll be able to look at Adrien and think of hate.”

“ _If_?” said Rena. “We’re gambling civilians’ lives on an ‘if’ now?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said, folding my arms. “Tell me Adrien didn’t start this--tell me Adrien didn’t _cause_ this--and I’ll let you go instead.”

She gave me a look that was surly and sheepish at the same time, and I suddenly knew what a friend I had there. She must have been angry with Adrien for everything he’d put Marinette through, but she wasn’t going to criticize him to a stranger.

“How do you know so much about it?” she said at last.

“I can’t tell you,” I said. “But _you_ can’t tell _me_ that I’m wrong.”

Her shoulders sagged. “Fine. Send in Adrien. But I’ll be watching. And if I think it’s going wrong, I’m not going to wait until you’re dead to intervene.”

“Sounds fair,” I said, holding out my hand for her to shake. She didn’t take it, but I didn’t mind. 

Was I as confident as I made out? I think I was. It was one of the good things about Marinette idealizing me--one of the good things about having a flawless, angelic, pretty-boy face--I knew she wouldn’t be able to look at me without the mask and harbour any negative emotions.

Of course, that wasn’t a complete solution, because she was being animated by _my_ negative emotions, but I knew that, if I saw love in her eyes, I wouldn’t be able to despair. If someone like Marinette was able to love me, then the world couldn’t be all bad.

I left Rena twisting her fingers in the half-collapsed tunnel, and went out to find Adrien. I couldn’t let Marinette see him climb up through the floor, from the same tunnels she’d been tracking Cat Noir through.

I climbed up to ground level, transformed, and then spent a few moments trying to remember how to breathe normally.

I put Tikki in my shirt-pocket--Plagg seemed to accept that it would be courteous to offer her the spot with the best view. She was as eager to see Marinette as I was. Plagg settled down in the pocket of my jeans, without any audible complaints.

I found the doorway--that was still standing, though it had turned from a rectangle into a weird parallelogram, and I didn’t trust it to stay up for long. From there, I had to climb back down to the cellar-level.

The sunlight was hot on my back, pouring in through the open roof, and I knew Marinette could see me. I wondered if she had recognized me yet. In a weird way, I hoped she hadn’t. I wanted to see the reaction in her eyes--Marinette’s raw, lovely, impulsive reaction--before Hawkmoth or The End had time to tidy it away. If I could see it, I was sure I’d have a handle on the despair.

In spite of all the devastating consequences, it was actually kind of hard to believe that she loved me, now that I came to this point. What was there to love, except my face? That wouldn’t be good enough for someone like Marinette.

I dropped into a pool of sunlight when I reached the rubble of the cellar floor, and could hardly see anything--just a lot of dust-motes swirling around like snowflakes--but I was used to walking around under bright lights. On a catwalk, you really can’t see anything except the stage in front of you, and you have to strut around as if you’re not half-blind.

It’s a confidence thing. You have to trust that you’re not going to fall, trust that nothing horrible is going to come flying out of the darkness and attack you.

I’d always found it easy because, my whole life, everyone had been so nice. I hadn’t known what kind of horrors to imagine.

It wasn’t easy now. I concentrated on my feet, and picked my way over the ridges and chasms in the direction of Marinette, clutching a Miraculous in each hand and hoping that, when I opened them, she wouldn’t notice how sweaty my palms were.

I couldn’t see her. I tried to persuade myself that this was a good thing. If I looked at her, I would only get distracted, and fall into a pot-hole or something--and I couldn’t afford to get injured now. But I hadn’t seen her look at me--at Adrien--since I had found out she loved me, and the idea made me incredibly nervous and incredibly excited at the same time.

My resolve held until I heard a wobbly, whispered “Adrien?” And then I had to look, even if it meant getting my retinas scorched.

I lifted my head and tried to make her out through the dazzling light. She was just an outline, but a familiar one--skinny and slumped, with her arms held awkwardly at her sides. Even the silk tentacles seemed to be drooping, as if they didn’t know how to be terrifying anymore, because they were suddenly part of a sweet, shy schoolgirl.

I took heart, and edged a little closer, out of the sunlight that had been pinning me down. I knew it would be a while before my eyes adjusted, and I was suddenly more nervous than I had ever been in my life, because that whispered ‘Adrien’ had been so hopeful--and oh god, it was going to hurt if a hope like that got snatched away from me.

I held out my hands, sweaty palms and all, and showed her the Miraculouses.

“Um. Cat Noir asked me to bring you these. He said you’d know what to do with them.” I hesitated, trying to make out that I was having trouble remembering his instructions, instead of having trouble keeping my voice steady. “He said to tell you that everything’s been taken care of, and the only thing left for you to do is fly.”

I heard a shuddering intake of breath, and then a crash. She had dropped to the floor. Whatever had been making her hover in mid-air suddenly cut out, and of course, she couldn’t stand on her broken leg. She landed in the rubble with her legs folded underneath her, her shoulders sagging, her whole frame shuddering with her frantic breaths.

I took half a step towards her, and then hesitated. If she was fighting the akuma, I didn’t want to break her concentration. But she looked so helpless that I couldn’t help edging closer, kneeling down in the rubble beside her.

The fog was still thick. I was too frightened that she was going to die. She was struggling against the despair at full strength, and there was nothing I could do to help her.

But then she muttered her little, hesitant “A-drien,” and I thought of all the times she had stuttered and blushed and garbled her words in front of me. I thought of her getting folded up in my umbrella on the first day of school, and suddenly I felt exactly the same as I had then--tenderly amused and weirdly delighted. Like, when I was with her, I could never be worried that it was all a dream, because she was so beautifully unpredictable.

I guess that was why I had run from her--because she let the world in--but the world wasn’t all bad, and even when it was, she was never scared of it.

She sniffed and looked up at me. And there it was. Endless love. I couldn’t believe I had missed it.

And now, when I look back on that moment, I don’t see the tattered grey dress, or the fog, or her bare, scratched arms--I just see the first time I looked in her eyes and actually knew what I was looking at.

The fog was thinning between us, making her eyes even brighter and bluer. I smiled, and it coaxed a smile from her in return. Her hands were clenched and bloody, but she was smiling.

And then she winced--I suppose Hawkmoth was shouting in her head, half-way between joy and desperation. The thought of what he might be saying made my flesh creep. Was he telling her I didn’t really care for her? That I _couldn’t_? That I was only here because I loved her like a sister, and wanted her to be a bridesmaid at mine and Kagami’s wedding?

For the longest time, she didn’t move. I counted twenty of my heart-beats, but my heart was hammering so fast that that couldn’t have taken very long.

Finally, she reached out her hands-- _both_ her hands, for both Miraculouses, and I said, “Tiny sidebar--I love you.”

She jerked to a halt in the act of reaching. She was stunned. I guess Hawkmoth was stunned too, because she was no longer wincing and shaking her head, as if to dislodge his voice. Her eyes widened--her mouth formed itself into a perfect little ‘o’--but I couldn’t see any hope there. She looked too tired for hope.

And then a tiny frown creased her forehead, as if she was remembering that I wouldn’t lie, not even to save lives.

Oh, she really thought I was perfect. No wonder she hadn’t recognized me as Cat Noir.

Her face was so open that I could follow all of this--she really had the best expressions. The next one seemed to take all her energy, but it was, by then, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was Ladybug’s determined pout. She folded my hand shut on the Cat Noir Miraculous, and then beckoned with her other hand to one of the silken tentacles. They were stirring fitfully beside her, as if they didn’t know what to do. But this one sprang into life as she beckoned, and handed her a little string of coloured beads--the good luck charm I had given her for her birthday, all those months ago. She put it in my other hand--the one that was still open. She brushed against the Ladybug earrings as she did so, but she didn’t take them.

Hawkmoth must have resumed his shouting, because her face screwed up in pain and determination. Worse still, the tentacles seemed to realize what was about to happen, because they went wild, scything through the air like scissor-blades. I had to jump back and clench my fist around the lucky charm to prevent them from snatching it out of my hand.

I slipped the Miraculouses into my shirt pocket, next to Tikki, and then frantically looked around for something to smash the lucky charm with. I was desperate enough to use the Cataclysm, but I didn’t want to be forced away from Marinette too soon. Even if I saved her from the akuma, someone had to be there to get her to a hospital, and Cat Noir would be faster than Adrien.

There was a fractured cinder-block as big as my fist amongst the rubble, and I picked it up and lifted it above the lucky charm, ready to smash. But a tentacle curled around my wrist and yanked me off balance.

Marinette was shouting something. She tried to stand, but couldn’t. She gritted her teeth and shut her eyes and--at the cost of another trickle of blood, this one dripping down from her nose--managed to get the tentacle to release me. Then her eyes snapped open, as if she had heard something I hadn’t.

I struggled to my feet, relocated my chunk of cinder-block and raised it over the lucky charm, but she cried out to stop me. “No, wait! Not yet!”

I stared at her. Her eyes were closed in concentration yet again, but none of the tentacles near us were moving.

“I can get him,” she muttered. “I can get him.”

“What? Who?”

And then I realized. Who would be the epitome of despair in that moment? Who’d had his best chance in years ruined by two love-sick teenagers?

She could find him with the fog. As long as she was still akumatized, she still had that power.

Which would have been fine, if she was in control of _all_ the tentacles. But Hawkmoth was fighting back. Or maybe it was the despair--The End. Maybe it sensed that it was losing its hold on her.

She had sent one tentacle questing after Hawkmoth, but the other ones were stirring, making a sound like angry bees. They started slicing through the air in front of her, as if to warn me off.

And then, in slow motion, I saw one of them rear up and wind itself around her neck.

“No!”

I jumped and ducked over the other tentacles that were scything through the air. One of them caught me in the ribs--with a strength you wouldn’t expect from silk--and knocked me back into the rubble, but I rolled upright and tried again, watching for the gaps between the tentacles, using my stick to vault off the walls when the floor wasn’t an option. My breath was burning in my lungs, my eyes stinging with the familiar sense of helplessness, but I made it through.

I dropped my stick, grabbed hold of the tentacle around Marinette’s neck, and cut it with my claws. But it still thrashed around, like some kind of severed limb. And meanwhile another one curled around my waist and threw me upwards.

And on the crest of that swing--right before gravity pulled me down again--I saw him. He was skidding along the road towards us, stirring up great clouds of dust in his wake. The tentacle was wrapped around his body, pinning his arms to his sides, but I could see his face: that familiar rictus of fury. Those curiously perfect white teeth. There was a crowd outside--the zombified minions of The End--and they parted wordlessly to let him through. 

All that was imprinted on my eyeballs as I hurtled down, landing in the rubble beside my fist-sized cinder-block. I knew what a chance we’d be giving up if I grabbed it. But I still grabbed it.

Marinette was blue in the face by now, but she waved an arm at me. She managed to say, between clenched teeth, “Not yet. Almost got ‘im.”

Rena started forwards from her hiding-place. “ _I’ll_ get him.”

“Rena, stay where you are!” I snapped. “Cat Noir needs you!”

“He’s not here,” she protested. “ _I_ am!”

I gritted my teeth against the rising panic. “Until I’m dead, do as I say!”

Rena stepped back, her hand over her mouth. But I didn’t have time to worry about her reaction. I looked at Marinette’s face. Her eyes were closed, but she was still shaking her head, whispering, “Not yet, not yet, not yet.”

“I am not doing this again,” I said.

She waved a frantic hand. She didn’t have the breath left to mutter. And then her hand began to waver, as if it was about to sink.

“I am not doing this again!” I shouted.

Her eyes snapped open, as if she had suddenly realized what I was saying, but I paid it no attention. I raised my cinder-block and smashed the lucky charm into little glass fragments. I think I went on smashing it long after the akuma had flown up from the remains--as if I had a grudge against it.

The tentacles dropped lifelessly to the floor. The one around Marinette’s neck unravelled as she toppled backwards--but she must have been over one of the potholes that led to the catacombs, because she kept falling, the silk kept unravelling. I started to my feet, but Tikki was quicker. Tikki’s restraint had finally snapped. I saw her shoot out of my shirt-pocket in a blur, like a red comet, the Ladybug earrings glinting under her arms.

She disappeared after Marinette.

There were a few heart-pounding moments of silence, as Rena and I watched the akuma beat its wings up to the open ceiling.

I don’t think I was worried. I don’t think I had the energy left to be worried. This was exactly the sort of moment where Ladybug would pop up, dive in, save the world in some spectacular fashion. I told myself that was what was going to happen, even though I had no idea how it _could_. I had thrown myself on trust.

But no matter how much I trusted, I wasn’t expecting that red and black spotted yo-yo to come shooting out of the depths and capture the akuma with one swing. I wasn’t expecting it to wrap itself around a spur of masonry and go taut, as if something was hauling on the other end of it. I wasn’t expecting Ladybug to drag herself out of that hole using the yo-yo string--or to drop to her knees and haul it in, opening up the case to release the de-evilized akuma. And I could never have expected that, after all that fog and darkness and blood, a bright white butterfly would emerge from the yo-yo and fly up towards the sunlight.

For a moment, I stared at her, as she knelt among the stones--on a broken leg--and tried to get her breath back. She had never looked as fragile or as awesome before. And she looked back at me and didn’t blush.

But then her strength gave out, her eyes slid shut, and she slumped sideways into the rubble.


	10. Maribug

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermath of The End storyline. Lots of romantic stuff in hospital, the least romantic of places!

Then it was Rena’s time to shine. I explained the illusion I wanted her to create, but she cottoned on fast, and filled in most of the details without being told.

She knew who I was by then, of course, so she must have figured I’d want an illusory Adrien to walk beside me out of the warehouse. She was a bit puzzled as to why I also wanted an illusory Ladybug--as far as she knew, Ladybug had been buried in that rubble the whole time, and had only been shaken awake when Marinette had fallen on top of her.

But she coped pretty well when I took off Ladybug’s earrings to reveal Marinette’s china-white face.

“Oh, you’re fucking kidding me,” she said. 

What Paris saw climb out of the ruins was Cat Noir carrying an unconscious Marinette, Ladybug limping alongside them, and Adrien, looking thoughtful but unharmed, bringing up the rear. Hawkmoth was gone by that point, but it was caught on camera. Nadia Chamok was there to wave a microphone at us and ask us how we felt. I declined to answer.

Rena was silent on the way to the hospital, gritting her teeth to keep the illusion in place. I didn’t have much energy to spare for her--I was too worried about Marinette--but I managed a feeble smile when we ducked into the lobby of an apartment building by the hospital, and she took off the illusion.

I transformed back into myself--I figured Adrien would have a marginally better chance of being allowed to stay by Marinette’s side than Cat Noir. And, after giving me a surly look from head to toe, Rena transformed too.

“You’re the best, Alya,” I said, hoisting Marinette in my arms and heading for the door.

Alya just prodded me in the back and told me to ‘hurry the fuck up’. Probably everything she said to me for the next few days would have a swear-word in it.

The moment we got to the hospital lobby, Marinette was hoisted out of my arms and whisked off on a stretcher. Alya and I tried to keep up with the doctors, as they wheeled her through corridors, asking us occasional questions about her injuries. But they managed to shake us off--there was a pair of big, forbidding double-doors that we weren’t allowed through--and we traipsed back to the lobby to wait for news.

After ten minutes, we saw her parents whirl past, wringing their hands and knocking into things. I tried not to notice how pale her mother was. I tried not to think of them asking themselves how Marinette could have despaired like that, when they loved her so much. I wasn’t just the one who had made her despair in the first place, I was the power-house behind the worst of it. But I couldn’t tell anyone that. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to tell Marinette.

I wasn’t sure how much she would remember. Sometimes the akuma-victims never recovered their memories of what they’d done--what had been done _to_ them. I wanted that to be the case for Marinette--I didn’t want her to suffer--but how was I going to start from the beginning, explaining what I knew and how I felt? Especially as I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, or eaten anything besides hot chocolate.

Alya didn’t speak to me much. She watched me fidgeting, standing up and sitting down again, absent-mindedly signing autographs for the nurses. Maybe she was still angry with me, but she saw that I needed some kind of distraction, because she opened up a game of scrabble on her phone and invited me to play.

It was probably good for both of us. When Nino turned up, and she raised her head to look at him, I saw that tears had been sliding silently down her cheeks without my noticing.

I didn’t have the heart to make her play after that, especially after Nino folded her up in his arms. I moved a few seats down to give them some privacy--and to try and avoid hating them for being so lucky.

I lay down across a couple of chairs and dozed, jerking awake every half-hour to demand if they’d heard any news. It was hard to relax, even when they told me she was fine--if a broken leg, three fractured ribs and a concussion could be called ‘fine’. My nerves had been wound up so tight. I’d been living through my worst nightmare for twenty-four hours, and I didn’t trust the horrors to stop.

To my vague surprise, my father didn’t turn up and order me home. I’d been expecting Nathalie to stroll in with an iPad screen at least, so that he could yell at me remotely. But the sun went down, Alya and Nino headed home, and still nobody came for me.

At about eleven, the bodyguard turned up and took a seat in the row of plastic chairs behind me. He didn’t speak to me--but then he seldom does. I figured he had told my father that I’d lied about the unscheduled day off, and he was there as a silent reminder that there would be consequences. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if a whole plane-load of consequences landed on my head tomorrow, as long as he let me stay in the hospital tonight.

***

Something like silence settled on the hospital lobby. Fewer people were rushed through on stretchers, the chatter of the nurses, paramedics and porters became muted, or trailed off entirely. The smell of strong coffee replaced the sound of talk. I looked back once, at around midnight, to see my bodyguard asleep in his chair. I genuinely don’t know his name. Marinette found out later, but I never asked her. I treasure my ignorance of that guy.

I was aching for sleep, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going home while everything was still so uncertain. I didn’t know if I’d really saved her yet. I didn’t know if she would still be Marinette, after everything she’d been through. And I didn’t know if she still loved me.

That shouldn’t have mattered. At the very least, it should have been secondary to everything else. But it kept bobbing to the surface of my thoughts, no matter how much I tried to distract myself.

I read magazines, I pillaged the vending machine for snacks--that kept me busy for a while, because I’d never had cheap, unhealthy, mass-produced food before. I was fascinated by the candy bars and potato chips. They didn’t exactly taste good, they just left a weird, compulsive film of grease on my tongue. I had to try them again just to be sure of what I’d really tasted.

And then I discovered the coffee machine. It was stationed just opposite the door to Marinette’s room, and examining it gave me an excuse to linger there, and see what I could guess about the room beyond through the gaps in the blinds.

It looked as if only her mother was in there with her. Maybe the hospital staff had made up a bed for her father in another room. Bakers probably had to go to bed early.

I got myself a coffee from the machine--another rare treat, drinking coffee this bad--and wondered if I could use it as an excuse for going in there--if I could knock on the door and say, “Excuse me, Mrs Dupain-Cheng, I was just getting myself a coffee and wondered if you wanted anything?’

I tried out five or six coffee-related excuses in my head, but I forgot them all when I finally plucked up the courage to knock.

Mrs Dupain-Cheng came to the door. She was rubbing her eyes, as if she wasn’t used to being up this late, but she smiled when she saw me.

“How are you, Adrien? I’m sorry she hasn’t woken--she’d be so happy to know you’d stayed.”

She hadn’t asked me _why_ I’d stayed, or whether anyone was expecting me at home. She had just accepted me, without any questions or concern, as if she knew how desperately I wanted to avoid talking at the moment.

She should have been a reassuring sight--she didn’t look out of her mind with worry--but it was hard to meet her eyes. She reminded me so much of my own mother--the hushed voice, the warm, wordless acceptance. And the room disoriented me. I hadn’t been prepared for the sight of Marinette, or the sound of the heart-monitor she was hooked up to. That steady, intrusive beeping made everything worse.

My mother was never in hospital, of course. One day she was there, and the next, she was gone. But I’d seen enough TV shows to associate the beeping of a heart monitor with desperate times.

Still, its rhythm was slow and steady. Marinette’s leg was in plaster, and raised up in a kind of harness over the bed, but she wasn’t hooked up to any tubes, and there was colour in her cheeks, as if she was still being Marinette--hopelessly clumsy but on fire with enthusiasm--in her dreams.

I realized Mrs Dupain-Cheng was looking at me expectantly, and I forced myself to say something.

“I… came to see if you wanted a rest. I can sit up with her, I don’t mind. I’ve got coffee,” I said, holding out my plastic cup, as if I thought she wouldn’t believe me. “Please?” I added, when she paused.

She nodded and patted me on the shoulder. Just like my mother--no need for words when a touch or a smile would do.

“Promise to call me if she wakes up?” she said, gathering up her things from the chair by Marinette’s bedside.

I nodded, and tried to return her smile.

When she left the room, shutting the door behind her, I listened for a moment--to the sound of her footsteps as they retreated down the corridor, to the remorseless beeping of that heart monitor.

“Tikki?” I said.

For the first time since we’d arrived, Plagg stirred in my pocket.

“Asleep under her pillow,” he murmured.

“Are you sure?”

He poked his head out and gave me his most supercilious expression. I decided not to argue.

I sank down in the chair next to Marinette’s bed, trying not to knock anything over. Flowers and cards had arrived already, and had been heaped onto the tables on either side of her bed. I wondered if any of them were from Luka.

She looked so pretty, in spite of everything. Her blue-black hair had been tied in its usual bunches. She was smiling faintly in her sleep.

It was such an inexpressible relief--not just to see her, but to see her looking so much like herself. I felt like I’d been holding my breath for twenty-four hours, and now I could finally exhale. I didn’t know what she was going to say to me when she woke up, but I knew she was always going to be her.

After a while, Plagg crept out of my pocket and flew up to my shoulder. He pretended her was just stretching after his nap, but I knew he wanted to look at her too.

“Why didn’t I see her, Plagg?” I said, leaning back in my chair. “I mean, forget that she has Ladybug’s eyes, Ladybug’s hairstyle, Ladybug’s voice and Ladybug’s figure. Forget all about Ladybug, in fact, and just look at her. She’s beautiful. Why didn’t I notice?”

“I have a few theories,” said Plagg.

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.

“Well?”

“You’re not going to like them.”

I sighed, and wondered if there was any way to escape hearing about them now. But, in a weird way, I wanted to know. I never wanted to be in that position again, where I had to reel from one horrified realization to another, as if they were all ranged round me in a circle, taking turns to punch me in the face. Where I only knew my true feelings when it was too late, and only knew my worst nightmare when it was coming true. I would face up to any number of unpleasant truths about myself to avoid going through that again.

“Well, look at the women you allowed yourself to notice,” said Plagg. “Ladybug and Kagami. They’re fierce and fearless and it’s pretty hard to imagine either of them getting hurt. You never had to worry about them. But this one,” he said, turning tender eyes on Marinette, “she was too real, too vulnerable, too easy to lose. You couldn’t stay away from her, but you could cut down on the terror she inspired in you by screening her out, insisting she was just a friend, shutting down your brain whenever it tried to put two and two together. You’re good at that.”

I sighed again and buried my face in my hands. I wanted to throttle him, I wanted to burst into tears, and I wanted to laugh. All three at once.

“You mean I went through all this because I was afraid of going through all this?”

He gave me a forlorn smile. “Pretty much. But you did brilliantly. You could have shut down, you could have given up--you _wanted_ to.”

With an effort, I lifted my head from my hands and looked at him. “I’m not angry, Plagg. If she can recover from this, so can I. If she _doesn’t_ \--if she scars or complications, or even nightmares--I’m going to track him down, and I’m going to kill him.”

“I’ll help you,” said Plagg.

I didn’t know how long I had been thinking this. There’d been no time to dwell on the anger before--though I had known it was there.

It didn’t really matter what he’d done to _me_ , although I was sure I’d be having nightmares about this for a long time to come. But seeing Marinette like this--knowing she had been this injured, or worse, when Hawkmoth had decided to use her--made up my mind.

And it was liberating to finally make up my mind. I didn’t have the burden of trying to find a good side to him, or trying to find something constructive to do with my anger. I hated him and he was going to pay. The end.

I leaned forward and rested my head on the edge of the bed. I guess I must have fallen asleep--or at least passed out--because the next thing I knew, there was a hand on my head, gently stroking me awake.

“Kitty,” she said, in a voice that was sleepy and slurred.

I think if I’d been less startled, I would have stayed there and enjoyed the feel of her hand on my hair--I would have put off the moment where she pulled it back, as she inevitably did when she saw my face.

Her eyes widened--I could see the blush starting in her cheeks--but instead of blurting out something wild and meaningless, she took a deep breath and said, “But it is you. Isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again. I wanted to ask her how she knew, but I didn’t trust my voice to stay steady, so I just nodded.

Again, I could almost trace her thoughts through her expressions. She looked pained and tender, smiling and wincing, as if it hurt to realize that I’d been Cat Noir all along, but she couldn’t look into my face and be sorry.

She was still blushing--possibly she was still despairing--but she felt for my hand on the bed and managed a smile.

“My kitty.”

“My lady,” I said, my throat tight.

She probably heard everything I’d been through in my voice, because her smile froze, and she tried to look into my eyes.

“Adrien… Are you O-?”

I shook my head to dismiss the question--although I guess it was also an answer.

“Just rest now,” I said. “You’ve got a broken leg, three fractured ribs and a concussion.”

“Oh. That must be why I’m talking to you so coheringly.” She blinked and looked up at the ceiling. “Coheringly?”

On a sudden impulse, I leaned forward and blurted out, “Marinette, I’ve been so dumb-”

She blinked again, startled, but I pulled myself back from the brink of being even dumber. “Sorry,” I said. “Time for that later. Rest now.”

She didn’t know what I meant. She must have been pretty out of it. I wondered if she would remember anything about this conversation tomorrow.

She leaned back against the pillows and shut her eyes. She still had my hand--she had placed it on her stomach, just below her bandaged ribs, without seeming to realize what she was doing. I didn’t pull away.

Her breathing was slow and steady, and for a moment I thought she was going to go back to sleep. But then her forehead creased.

“Adrien?” she said, without opening her eyes. “Did I hurt anybody?”

“No.”

“Did I hurt _you_?”

I tried to shake my head, but the enormity of the lie paralysed me. “Not your fault,” I said, in the same tight-throated voice.

She opened one eye apprehensively. “I’m so sorry. If I’d known y-- _Cat Noir_ \--had already lost somebody, I would never have asked him to leave me. It was all my own fault I got trapped down there--I shouldn’t have relied on him to bail me out.”

“ _Was_ it all your own fault?” I muttered, looking down at the covers.

She didn’t understand what I meant at first. The concussion was still slowing her reactions. Then I saw her frown and try to sit up--only her ribs were bandaged too tightly.

“Don’t you dare--”

“What are you doing?” I said, trying to force her back down without hurting her. “Didn’t you hear me say you had three fractured ribs?”

“I’m not just going to sit back and let you blame yourself!” 

“Oh, you are so Ladybug,” I said, pushing her down on the bed a little less gently. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

She lay still for a moment, but the creases on her forehead didn’t go away.

“Are you disappointed?” she said, in a small voice.

I narrowed my eyes. “Disappointed? That Ladybug turned out to be the only person in the world I loved as much as Ladybug?”

“But… you loved me in a different way…”

Her eyes were shut, but her voice was gentle. She wasn’t going to pretend it didn’t hurt, but she didn’t want to make me feel bad either. Like I said before, endless love. I could see it even when her eyes were closed now.

“I thought I did,” I said heavily. “No, you know what? I don’t think I thought about it at all. Plagg says I was trying to screen you out, because I was afraid of falling in love--only I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love, I could only stop myself from _realizing_ it.”

I broke off. Her heart monitor was beeping so fast that the separate beats had almost blurred together. I felt a lurch of panic and dragged my hand away.

“Sorry. We can talk about this when you’re feeling better.”

She blushed, as if she’d been caught out, and then settled back against the pillows, looking adorably sulky. “Stupid heart monitor,” she muttered, under her breath.

I smiled. “Marinette, I’m glad it’s there.”

"You meant it? What you said in the warehouse?"

"That I love you? Yes."

She looked down at the sheets. “Because it’s OK if you don’t feel the same way about Marinette as you did about Ladybug. It’s messed-up, getting to know two different people and then finding out they’re the same person. There’s no right or wrong way to feel.”

I stared at her. She was ploughing determinedly through this speech without meeting my eyes, as if she wouldn’t have the strength to keep going if she looked at me. It was such a noble, selfless, Marinette thing to do--no, a _Ladybug_ thing to do. At that moment, the two of them coalesced in my mind like they never had before. I lurched forward and planted a kiss on her cheek.

“Maribug,” I said--a name that came to me on the spur of the moment, but felt oddly familiar on my tongue. “Maribug, stop it--stop being so you. But also, never stop being so you.”

I kissed her cheek again, her forehead, and the tip of her nose--I guess I thought, in my sleep-deprived mind, that if I avoided her lips, the heart-monitor wouldn’t reproach me with its beeps. But I was in no state to be restrained, and Marinette kissed me back, and in the end the beeps got drowned out by my own thumping heartbeat.

When I opened my eyes, her hand was buried in my hair, and she was laughing--or half-laughing and half-crying.

“Oh, what am I going to do?” she spluttered. “I’m so happy. How am I going to keep my mind on the job now I know you’re you? How am I going to concentrate on supervillains now I know that face is under there?”

I laughed again. I loved how her imagination hurtled down these roads, without being able to stop itself. She had folded me in, and not just because her arms were round me. When Marinette talked to you, you were never on the outside. Everything was a wild scheme or an unbridled disaster, and she would invite you in, share it with you, speak to you as if you were part of it all. That breathy, confidential voice, the stream-of-consciousness babbling, the expressions--god, I could look at her for a hundred years and never get tired of her expressions! Why had I never realized how happy she made me?

I kissed her forehead and said, “Let me get your mother. I promised I’d wake her when you came round.”

I headed for the door, but she called me back.

“Wait--Adrien,” she hissed. “What do they know? Is everything…out?”

“No,” I said. “All these flowers and gifts are for Marinette, not Ladybug.”

“But how did you…?”

I told her about Rena’s illusion. I told her how I’d led her into the warehouse where Ladybug had disappeared to make it seem as if she’d been there all along and Hawkmoth had just missed her in the rubble.

I guess I was boasting--Cat Noir got the better of me--because she was smiling and shaking her head by the time I’d finished.

“You were brilliant, Kitty. I can’t believe you walked into that warehouse with no superpowers--with a real miraculous clutched in each hand--and just held them under the nose of the akuma-victim! And Master Fu _let_ you!”

“Trust, princess,” I said. “There was no universe in which you would have disappointed us.”

This was an over-simplification, of course, but I didn’t tell her about my misgivings. It’s my job--as a model _and_ as a superhero--to look more confident than I feel. And anyway, I hadn’t doubted her ability to fight the akuma, I had just doubted her ability to love me.

She nudged me with her shoulder, smiling and self-conscious.

“You must have been very sure that the sight of Adrien would get through to me.”

“Well, my face is my fortune.”

She laughed. “Just don’t underestimate your brain, that’s all I’m saying.”


End file.
